Join us for an interactive day of learning and the practical application of 10 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 they think. If we improve the quality of our thinking the quality of the actions that follow will improve.

The Six Thinking Hats are designed to dramatically improve the way individuals and groups think. The methods are used to look at issues from multiple perspectives and help teams to move beyond their 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 lay out a thinking process,
  

• The ability to better navigate complex and difficult issues,

• the ability to design and facilitate effective, outcome oriented meetings,     

• the ability to generate genuinely new ideas using lateral thinking methods,     

• and become more thorough and objective thinkers.

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 and embed the methods and practice 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.

Course Brochure: Six Thinking Hats ALDC May 29, 2012

To Register: Click Here

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

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There are two broad pathways to efficiency and sustainable practice.

Mandated requirements to look beyond economic considerations demand that we make a concerted effort seek out new ways and means of developing efficient and sustainable business practices.

The first pathway is one we all understand and routinely apply – i.e. conserving our resources so they are not depleted and therefore available for ongoing use. The second involves designing new and improved ways of doing things that do not tie us to the limiting factors of current thinking, practice and resource.

The first path is about the maintenance of the status-quo. So even when we act sustainably we can in effect be going backward with the quality of our services diminishing. I refer to this approach as Rear-View path. It is largely reactive and although we seek to move forward with good intent, this is in effect like trying driving a car whilst focusing primarily on the rear-view mirror and not the windscreen.

The Rear-View is dominated by austerity methods such as staff cuts, wage-freezes, cost-cutting and a hold on new projects. With the Rear-View to sustainability we adopt reactive and precautionary approaches in which we seek to do the same things we have done in the past but faster and at less cost.  The Rear-View pathway is characterised by  short-term “management” thinking that ultimately contributes to a downward spiral in efficiency given that service demands usually increase, and cheaper and faster rarely equate to better.

The old mantra of doing more with less is fine but let’s focus on the more in addition to the less.

The second path to sustainability is a proactive one and through new design focuses on the “more”.

With design we seek to develop new ways of delivering the same value (or better) but in manners newly conceived. The thinking here is quite different to the Rear-View and I refer to it as Forward-View (not a real imaginative name I know, but it serves purpose!) On this Forward-View pathway we design and navigate our way forward with an eye firmly focused on the future. The Forward-View is characterised by new thinking, design and navigation. This pathway challenges the status quo and asks “Are they other ways we can do this better?”

Longer-term “leadership” thinking forms the basis for the Forward-View as we focus on What can be rather than the usual What is. Forward-View approaches involve the application of methods that assist organisations to build agility and navigate difficult times with greater impact.

These methods include:

1. New ways of focusing on and defining our real issues
2. New ways of thinking and collaborating,
3. New means of tapping into our diversity & knowledge,
4. The means of scanning and understanding the shifting environment,
5. New ways of generating genuinely new perspectives, insights & approaches, and
6. More practical means of safe implementation that are not bogged down with bureaucratic processes and the fear of failure.

Austerity methods absolutely have their place but we need to be aware of their limitations and not overuse them when better ways can be conceived.

Both pathways need to be applied and intertwine, but we must learn not to routinely default to the Rear-View path alone as our management practices to date have had us do.  The degree to which one pathway predominates is wholly dependent on context but an approach to sustainability that involves only one reactive pathway diminishes capacity over time, and this is not sustainable.

Organisations looking to build on their capacity to navigate difficult economic times and make sustainable practice a part of normal business are invited to contact us at Think Quick to discuss how we can assist in incorporating Forward-View thinking and action with a view to building business efficiency and proactive sustainable practices.

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One of the most important things we do in organisations is interact in meetings.

Yet 90% of people I speak to indicate their meetings are not as productive as they could be or worse, a waste of their time. There is a general consensus across industry that our meetings are all too often insufficiently focused, lacking sound collaborative approaches, have a limited outcome orientation and consume way more time than is necessary.

The importance of meetings in an organisation cannot be understated. In terms of knowledge-transfer and decision-making our meetings are potentially our most potent method because we:

• have the right subject matter experts invited and in attendance,
• if they are in attendance, they should be there with intent, and
• they are in a face-to-face setting where the most meaningful communication should be possible.

There are a number of methods doing the rounds that focus on improving meeting processes and many of these work well but the key to effective meetings is addressing the thinking that takes place within those processes. At Think Quick we have facilitated many difficult and potentially difficult meetings using the Six Thinking Hats and have high levels of success.

Not all meetings of course require such facilitation, I suspect a great deal could be run simply and efficiently if the participants could simply develop some tolerance and empathy for opinions that differ from their own. However, we routinely use the  parallel thinking of the Thinking Hats when:

• there are strongly held views
• there are challenging issues at hand
• there are diverse perspectives on offer
• the conversation is rambling and unfocused, and
• when time is short

The challenge is to incorporate the methods into meetings so they become a part of business practice and are routinely applied. This challenge when accepted is one that can bare great benefits.

To date, just a few of our client’s successes using parallel thinking in their meetings have been:
• Millions of dollars worth of savings in one Department where such saving could not be envisaged prior.
• A $600,000 saving within a business unit as a result of training in the thinking and its subsequent same day application to a key issue.
• The smooth planning of moving 20+ city locations into one newly constructed building.
• A business restructure planned and implemented without any of the associated angst by getting everyone thinking in parallel throughout.

Meetings can be productive, focused and enjoyable. They are the primary engine-room for transferring knowledge and making decisions in organisations, so if you get the thinking right in your meetings right, the flow-on effects are substantial.

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As the economic climate tightens and the challenge not just to thrive but survive increases, the need for Business Efficiency has rarely been greater. Irrespective of industry type we are all going to need to do more with less, increase savings & revenue and improve our product and service delivery. Not only this, it’s all going to have to be done in a sustainable manner.

We don’t however, just suddenly flick a switch and become “business efficient.”  To start down the business efficiency path we need to ensure we have four key elements in place:

We must start with an understanding that everything we do can be improved – even those things that are working well at the moment. Once any new process is implemented the impact-clock starts ticking because the environment for which it was designed inexorably changes and it’s efficacy starts to diminish. If we wait until we can sense the loss of impact we have usually lost the opportunity to intervene in a time and resource effective way. Like it or not all of our processes are in some way failing or moving toward failure without the appropriate oversight.

How do we know when our organisation has this understanding? Organisations that have this understanding don’t only speak of Problem Solving, they have a substantial focus on Opportunity Identification and designing genuinely new ways forward.

Once we acknowledge this we must then have a willing disposition to continuously improve all of our efforts. Easily said, but this is often ignored in favour of the status-quo or superceded by the day-to-day demands of business as usual. The most successful organisations have a willing disposition and commitment to work both “on” and “in” the business as standard practice.

How do we know if our organisation has this willing disposition? Organisations with this disposition typically commit  resources to ongoing improvement methods and tend to maintain or even boost these resources in challenging economic times when business efficiency is most needed.

The third element is a toolkit of simple and easily applied tools and methods to apply to the challenge of being more efficient in business. If asked, most of your staff will readily point to areas that need improving or could be more efficient, but they don’t have the right techniques at their disposable to readily tackle them. When this happens improvement efforts can be hap-hazard and tackled with inappropriate methods resulting in a frustration, failure and reduction in the disposition to continuously improve.

How do we know when we  have these methods at our disposal? If your organisation has these methods there will be a dramatic reduction in the reliance on external consultants. There will also be less tendency to invest and apply old methods that are context-inappropriate and offer no reasonable means of measuring dollars saved, efficiencies gained or return on investment.

The fourth key element is the clear authorising environment that enables people to continuously work “on” the business. In such an environment business efficiency is not only encouraged but mandated and expected.

How can we tell if we have an authorising environment? There is no exhaustive list here but some of the indicators are your Organisational Change related leaders will be a part of the Leadership Team, not just reporting to it. All staff with have time allocated to undertake improvement related tasks. Personal development plans will explicitly include activities for working “On” the business and you will have a more empowered workforce more likely to commit greater discretionary effort in improving services and the bottom-line.

In organisations I have worked in and with, I have NEVER seen all four elements together. Even the co-existence of three at the same time is very rare. Of course there have been many using the words and language of business efficiency because we are good at crafting aspirational missions and visions, but we are correspondingly poor in moving them into reality through action.

In today’s changing world and tough economic climate we actually need to DO and ACT. We can no longer continue to talk and analyse and expect to be successful. We need to raise our heads and start designing our forward.

If we want our organisation to prosper, we need to take the focus off categorising personality types or analysing employees past performance to determine where and how they fit.  Instead, we need to empower them with new approaches and methods that will allow them to move the organisation forward with efficiency and also determine where and how they fit themselves.

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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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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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