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.)

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“A huge thanks for what was hands down the best and most practical training I have ever done.  As a mediator I loved the close parallels between the hats and the various stages and foci of mediation, but even apart from that I pretty much started using the training as soon as I walked out the door. ” (March 18 participant)

Join us for a highly interactive day of learning and practical application of 12 thinking tools at Melbourne’s most prestigious training venue.

People and organisations are seeking improvement and quality across many areas except that which is the most important – the quality of the way we think.

If we improve the quality of our thinking the quality of the actions that follow correspondingly improve.

The Six Thinking Hats are designed to dramatically improve the way we think. The methods are used to look at issues from multiple perspectives and help us to move beyond our habitual thinking styles to achieve a more rounded and thorough view of a given situation.

In this full day session participants will develop:

• a sound understanding of multiple thinking styles,
• the ability to design and facilitate effective, outcome oriented meetings,
• the ability to generate new ideas using lateral thinking methods,
• the ability to design and lay out a thinking process, and
• become a more thorough and objective thinker.

The session will be held at Melbourne’s premier training venue and all participants will be provided with an optional work-based assessment with which to immediately start to apply the methods back in the workplace. Successful completion of this assessment provides the “Blue Hat Facilitator” Pin.  Email & telephone coaching will be provided to assist with this at no additional cost.

Date & Time : 8:30am – 4:30pm, Friday May 27, 2011

Where: The Airlie Leadership Development Centre, 260 Domain Rd South Yarra

Value: $499/person with an early rate of $449/person up until May 13

Other: Participants from all sectors are welcome. Coffee/Tea will be provided upon arrival by qualified Baristas and the highest quality morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea will be provided. (If you’ve been to Airlie before you’ll know what this means!)

Course Brochure: Hats training ALDC May 27

To Register: Click Here

For more information, contact Frank at Think Quick on 0400 109727, or think.quick@me.com

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I’ve just been fortunate enough to spend some time in Bangkok teaching Lateral Thinking on behalf of the deBono Institute to a combined group of Thai and Indonesian staff from Exxon-Mobil. I promised the students that I would share a few online insights on my time with them, hence this post!

First off I must concede that Lateral Thinking is not for everyone, the methods push your brain into an unstable state and many are far from comfortable with this. It’s far easier to simply default to thinking and doing the same old things, the same old way because they are comfortable and worked in the past.

Sadly the world does not work like this. We now have an urgent need to think laterally as it’s a means of breaking the existing and well-established patterns that already exist in our heads. Without doing so we are doomed to producing the same old thoughts and ideas ad infinitum, and never come to grips with the increasing number of new and complex challenges facing us.

Anyway, despite the associated difficulties with learning these new and challenging tools, the students took to them with a great deal of enthusiasm. The thing that really impressed me the most, is that this course is delivered in English, and English for every student in the room constituted their 2nd or even 3rd language. (My Thai and Indonesian is pretty good, but a vocabulary of 4 or 5 words will just not cut it.) So not only did they grapple with new concepts and ideas, but they did it in a language that I assume was much less comfortable to them than others.

I suspect many here in Australia would struggle to be able to do similarly, let alone be able to speak multiple languages. I have read in the past that those with additional language skills have a correspondingly greater number of connections form in their brains, so I wonder if this was a factor in the groups uptake of the tools?

During the course of the two days training we looked at a number of issues, both organisational and personal, to which we could apply the lateral thinking tools. These included such diverse topics as “generating ideas to increase collaboration across the organisation’s international boundaries”, “challenging aspects of their personal development plan process” and “designing a new type of toothbrush”.  The final idea generation session during which the group applied all of the tools in an end to end process, involved generating new ideas to assist themselves to save money better and make sound personal investment decisions for the future.

Anyway, if these students were typical of the calibre of staff that the organisation has in both Thailand and Indonesia, we can expect good things from Exxon-Mobil in the future.

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People and organisations are seeking improvement and quality across many areas except that which is the most important – the quality of the way we think.

If we improve the quality of our thinking the quality of the actions that follow correspondingly improve.

The Six Thinking Hats are designed to dramatically improve the way we think. The methods are used to look at issues from multiple perspectives and help us to move beyond our habitual thinking styles to achieve a more rounded and thorough view of a given situation.

In this full day session participants will develop:

• a sound understanding of multiple thinking styles,
• the ability to design and facilitate effective, outcome oriented meetings,
• the ability to generate new ideas using lateral thinking methods,
• the ability to design and lay out a thinking process, and
• become a more thorough and objective thinker.

The session will be held at Melbourne’s premier training venue and all participants will be provided with an optional work-based assessment with which to immediately start to apply the methods back in the workplace. Successful completion of this assessment provides the “Blue Hat Facilitator” Pin.  Email & telephone coaching will be provided to assist with this at no additional cost.

Date & Time : 8:30am – 4:30pm, Friday March 18, 2011

Where: The Airlie Leadership Development Centre, 260 Domain Rd South Yarra

Value: $490/person with an early rate of $440/person up until Feb 25

Other: Participants from all sectors are welcome. Coffee/Tea will be provided upon arrival by qualified Baristas and the highest quality morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea will be provided. (If you’ve been to Airlie before you’ll know what this means!)

Many thanks for your response to this. The session is now fully subscribed and we look forward to a big day on the 18th!

We will be scheduling another session within the week so please watch this space!

Flyer: Six Thinking Hats training ALDC Mar 18

Any enquires may be directed to Frank at think.quick@me.com / 0400 109727 or Laurel on 0417 321296

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Lateral thinking is a way of breaking existing and predictable patterns of thought so that new perspectives, new concepts and new ideas can emerge.

The complexity of the problems we face today demand that we approach them in an altogether different manner. We are not well served by the logical and linear methods we have become so comfortable with over time, and need new means of addressing those issues that seem to have gotten-away from us over time.  These could be environmental issues, public order issues, a failing health system or any of a litany that are never long out of the news.

When thinking laterally we seeks solutions to an intractable problems through unorthodox methods that would normally be ignored by logical thinking. New ways of thinking can provide new options and open doors we didn’t know existed. This is why we have an absolute need for Lateral Thinking. Through this type of thinking we disrupt linear thinking sequences and arrive at potential solution from other angles.

Developing breakthrough ideas does not have to be the result of luck. Lateral thinking provides a deliberate, systematic process that results in more innovative thinking. You do not need to be a creative genius to use these methods, they follow very specific processes and I’d back someone who can follow process using the tools to produce more ideas than any creative genius without the tools, any day!

The video attached is an impromptu capture of a lateral thinking process that trainees undertook to complete their two day training in the methods earlier this month. The and simply outlines the key stages of an end to end approach to developing new insights and ideas to address a complex issue.

Logical and linear thinking are fine in context, but they are not nearly enough. It’s time to seriously consider new ways of dealing with those issues that will just not go away.

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The most common mistakes we make in our thinking are in the way we perceive the world around us. By and large our logic is quite sound but two people can look at the same thing and perceive it very differently. Our “perception” therefore involves not just what what comes through our collective eyes, but what goes on in our individual minds.

How then, do we get a sufficiently comprehensive view of an issue so that multiple perspectives can be incorporated and the best possible decisions made?

Last month Think Quick conducted a series of training pilots in a major Victorian Govt Dept to provide staff with a range of thinking tools to broadening their scanning ranges and perceptions across particular issues and thereby add value to the business of Govt. As a part of this training all participants were asked to complete a work-based assessment designed to help embed the learning into ongoing practice.

The training conducted, The Power of Perception™ provides 10 strategic thinking tools for sharpening perception and focusing thinking in a comprehensive, effective and efficient way.

As the assessments are being completed we are now seeing value added through the practical use of the tools. The application of four of the tools in sequence (diagram above) produced the simplification of a process involving the allocation of $30 million dollars per annum (fig 1.) Not only will this process aid in the simplification of the resource allocation but also carry the associated benefits of saving time, lowering meeting costs and reducing the red tape in decision making.

At the same time we are seeing the application of the tools in the personal lives of trainees with one family recently applying the methods to aid their year 12 level son to consider future options and their consequences, assess those options and make an informed decision on what he will do in 2011.

We are all good thinkers when we put our minds to it, but the application of some process and structure to our deliberations with simple, yet rigorous thinking tools, can make the tasks at hand a hell of a lot easier!

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