LETS KEEP THINGS SIMPLE

Yes but - and it’s a big BUT - be very careful. Our very human mind finds it appealing to create stories or conspiracy theories where none actually exist. It constantly tries to simplify and find neat patterns and answers.

 It does not appreciate the idea of things happening at “random” but likes to discover patterns and use simplifying devices like runes and rhymes. Here’s one about my book:-

“Just read this book and have no fear, it’ll help you think and change your career“

It’s strange but expressed like that it conveys a possibility of truth that the blunt “read this and get on” will not. The latter sells assertively, the former wraps up the thought in a kind of irrefutable, pseudo-biblical parcel.

Myers Brigg, a system strongly advocated by many does just that too. For those who don’t know about it it’s the Personality Checking System beloved of HR people. If you haven’t been Myers Brigged then you probably haven’t got a personality in the accepted sense of the word. Ironically it identifies around the same number of types of personality as the number of behaviours performed by the Mexican Green Lizard that have been identified by Californian PHD students. That’s 27.

Well I may be perverse but I think there are more than twenty seven personality types. I think it’s the diversity of people and their attitudes and behaviour that makes humanity so fascinating. So, yes, I am very cautious about oversimplification.

The more one studies the brain and the process of thinking the more inappropriate it seems to dumb down and pigeon hole the issues. The brain is so complex, so magical and so surprising that a bit of messiness in describing it seems not only right; it seems to capture the ability and indeed the need of the brain to juggle and dance in a bizarre way.

In fact Martin Sorrell who runs the advertising giant WPP nailed it when he said:- “The 21st Century is not for tidy minds.”

And now to demonstrate how untidy I can be I’m going off slightly, at a tangent, to advocate a principle about sticking to the obvious whilst not oversimplifying.

There are two so-called laws of psychology worth bearing in mind here.  “Occam’s Razor” which espouses simplification (in an acceptable way) in suggesting that it’s the simplest cause of an event that is likeliest to be the true one. Experience would tend to confirm this is generally the case, but with the proviso that the second law of “Occam’s Broom” doesn’t also apply which is the urge to sweep inconvenient evidence under the carpet that seems to disprove “Occam’s Razor”.

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson is coming out on November 12th 2014

A RECIPE FOR INSANITY

I want you to do a simple task whilst driving - multiply 14 by 27. Ha! You can’t do it. Of course you can’t.  Or if you can you’ll be wound around a lamp post by now. Proof that the multitasking myth is just that: a piece of dangerous fantasy. 

Juggling is clever. It’s a skill people get to learn and get better at it but it’s pretty one dimensional. It’s a circus act.  Juggling is for clowns.

The current story is that this new technophiliac generation is being hardwired differently to the rest of us and that they can learn how to do a series of thinking tasks concurrently - like do homework, watch TV, send a text, play a video game and make a phone call. They claim to have seen it happen with their children. They speak of it in awe. All I’d ask is that they take a good, hard look at that homework.

Quite simply, although our brains are wonderful and currently beyond most of our comprehension, we do realise that they aren’t set up to do conscious tasks in tandem. The most successful people blinker themselves and focus (yes I’m forced to use that word I hate) on addressing, thinking about and completing the task in hand.

The most precious commodity in the world is probably “attention” - the capacity to engage one’s mind on a single thing. We are bombarded with messages and stimuli which are exciting and enriching but this also presents us with a big challenge.

We have to make choices about what we do first - hang on - be back in a second I’ve just had another e-mail - yes that’s increasingly our default mode. We’re constantly being interrupted and what we do is give all the attention to the most recent communication for a few seconds until something new happens. Our ability to be disciplined and concentrate will determine our success in thinking.

The psychologists describe this dilemma as being ‘cognitively busy.’ It impairs social behaviour making you more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language and make superficial judgements.

So if you think multitasking is the sign of a dynamic executive think again - you’d be better off taking a break and sitting quietly and thinking.

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson is coming out on November 12th 2014

LEARNING TO SEE THINGS

Steve Jobs said:   "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while."  

Steve is probably over-quoted by anyone who writes about creativity but this is really good. A friend who went to art school told me she was not taught to draw and paint so much as to see things. Try standing in front of a painting for half an hour really looking at it, trying to see everything. Not done it before? Well it’ll probably give you a headache and it’ll also show you just how little you normally see or how casually you look at things.

But here’s the trick. Seeing things isn’t something you can force. Let thoughts and observations come to you. And when they do come to you relish them. To get the most out of great food you need to chew gently quite a lot.

Seeing things and making connections is the essence of all great creativity. But creative thinking requires two other things:

• Great memory
• A bit of rebelliousness

The memory allows us to make better and more enlightened connections more easily. The rebelliousness allows us to break the mould or do something utterly surprising and ahead of the herd. There was I recall a Levi Jeans ad which said “when the others zig, zag”.

Be zaggers if you want to make a bit of impact.

Jefferson said that a little rebellion was a good thing - having just help drive the British from America we can see why he might say this.

As a brief formula for successful creative thinking this isn’t bad but of course it slips into the standard thinking fallacy of oversimplifying. Being an accomplished creative thinker takes time and experience too. Malcolm Gladwell in his book ‘Outliers’ reckons even the greatest creative minds take 10,000 hours to attain mastery.

That means a lot more learning, looking, listening and reading for most of us.

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson is coming out on November 12th 2014

HARRIET GREEN SCARES ME TO DEATH

Harriet’s CEO of Thomas Cook. She’s turned a basket case of a company into a Prada handbag. So she’s terrific. But here’s what she said about sleep:

“I don't sleep much, I never have. It's over-rated.”

Apparently she manages on less than three hours a night. Well done her - for now - until she implodes - because life has an ironic way of mugging people who flaunt their alpha-ness.

My advice to you if you want to think and produce thoughtful and carefully created solutions, not plans that are conceived in a daze, is the following:

• Slow down - most golf swings by the greats look measured and graceful. That’s what we want our leaders to look like and how we them to behave.
• Calm down by breathing deeply and employing (within reason) mindfulness. Clear your mind but don’t empty it.
• Use soft eyes. Sit and look gently into the middle distance letting your unblinking eyes float and go soft. Try it - it’s an ideal mode for deep reflection.
• Then try and widen your angle of vision. Think about a problem and imagine standing above it and doing two things: seeing it in a broader context and also seeing how small or big it is real terms.
• Most of all listen carefully and stand up straight and notice what’s going on around you.

• And sleep. Sleep restores you, replenishes your energy and in your sleep your brain is sorting things out and quite often finding ingenious solutions to intractable problems. 

When I was young, dynamic, thrusting and a greasy pole climber - a thoroughly ghastly person - I was shockingly unobservant, unpunctual but I had a remorseless focus. This is my least favourite word in the current management lexicon (it comes next to passion). That’s when I behaved like Harriet and had 5am meetings just for show.

And then I read Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” where he says:

“…cognitive load is not the only cause of weakened self-control. A few drinks have the same effect as does a sleepless night.”

Harriet do you hear me?

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson is coming out on November 12th 2014

AM I PART OF THE ESTABLISHMENT?

I’ve been worrying about this all week. In the wake of the resignation of Fiona Woolf as Chair of the Abuse Enquiry the question as to who knows whom and what this “establishment” actually is has been preying on my mind. Fiona, when asked if her successor would be difficult to find, suggested yes,  it might need to be a hermit.

So I thought about my own track record. Grammar School - good; Oxford - bad; Balliol - really terrible; live/have always lived in London and the south east - oh dear; friends include lawyers, civil servants, politicians, high rolling business people - all very, very bad.

But I regard myself as a bit of a rebel which is, of course, not just bad but dangerous. It defines me as a kind of Che Guevara figure - establishment gone a bit mouldy.

The issue is a sensitive one. Fiona Woolf antagonised the survivors of abuse by describing them as the “victim community”. These are not just victims, they are very angry and at last they see an opportunity to achieve revelation, reprisal and reform.

The agenda is changing from an enquiry into an issue into a broad based scrutiny of British Society’s attitude and behaviour towards children in the mid-20th century.  This will dig deep into public school education, the church, charities and any institutions which “helped” young people. It will tangle with issues of privilege, loyalty to colleagues and concepts like giving people a second chance.

The idea of whistleblowing, abhorrent to most of us when I was young, is now required behaviour. The idea of making a fuss however much you suffered used to be regarded as unmanly or unseemly. Lips were upper and stiff.

Today we live in a better, kinder and cleaner world. Young people today are bemused by what seems a conspiratorial and violent past. Yet as a country we remain rather grumpy. Research at Warwick University shows the Danes and Dutch are the happiest whilst the Brits and Americans are genetically under-provided with serotonin, the happiness chemical. Only the French are gloomier than we are.
C’est la vie.

But how do you choose the right  people for important jobs? At Google executives face a barrage of interviews - up to 25 of them with, accordingly, plenty of opportunity to uncover flaws.

Yet at many places the process of selection seems to be more light touch.

Interviewing to uncover a candidate’s defects is a pretty inexact science, let’s face it, but I loved the story of the executive who at the end of an interview which had gone really well was asked “And finally Mr Hall can you tell me what your biggest weakness is?”

There was a silence while the candidate thought and then said.
“I suppose it’s my honesty”.

The Chairman of the panel smiled and said.

“I don’t think that’s a weakness Mr Hall.”

To which the candidate replied.

“I don’t care what the hell you think.”

APRES MOI PLUS CA CHANGE

Wherever I go people tell me that times are terrible, unprecedented and that le deluge is on the horizon. And they tell about a whole load of extraordinary conspiracy theories.

That The Duke of Edinburgh had Diana killed, that the Malaysian Airline was brought down by the CIA, that the Ebola epidemic is the result of a Chinese biological warfare experiment gone wrong, that Nigel Farage is being funded by Qatar, that President Bush arranged the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, that there was corruption in the Scottish Independence Referendum and the result should have been a “yes” win and that yes indeed the moon is made of cheese.

Nothing is normal in many people’s minds because normal is a bit boring. The human brain is ingenious and complex and loves making up stories. There’s a theory known as Occam’s Razor which states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. In other words the least convoluted simple story is probably right; accident, hard luck or human error - that kind of thing.

The reason we are such a melodramatic bunch is that it feeds our fascination with the macabre. Our brain’s default mode is in fact wandering about not being a forensic Sherlock Holmes’ organ of investigation, problem solving and decision making. We are hardwired to like storytelling and surprises.

Yet the prosaic truth is we have despite the shocks along the way managed to create a well-ordered world where most systems work pretty well with occasional misfiring like an unnecessary war or a deposition of a dictator (hurray!) but with unforeseen consequence (ahh!)

What we find it harder to do is learn from experience and  accept that ordinary can be OK .

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson is coming out on November 7th 2014

THE CHEF'S GUIDE TO THINKING

This started with me realising that Anthony Bourdain had written the seminal book on management in his “Les Halles Cookbook”. It had things in the introduction like this about cooking:

…“it’s all about transformation, about taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary. That’s magic.”

And that’s what creative thinking does. That’s what the whole concept of “value added” is about. Taking a commodity and making it special and desirable. Welcome indeed to the inner sanctum of marketing. Creating a brand….that’s magic too.

Let’s examine this maestro’s attitude towards cooking. It’s a pleasurable process in its own right and the more you practice the better you get (sound familiar that?) and the outcome is or should undoubtedly be pleasurable. But before you start, it requires deep planning and preparation.

• Be a  fanatic about writing lists - “sorry I forgot to” is not an excuse in the kitchen or the boardroom - have a brilliant countdown timetable
• Reconnaissance - what’s available, what’s good, what’s easy - don’t try to work with bad ingredients.
• “Mise en place” - the belief system - this is the basis on which genius can be based and without which incompetence is likely
• Deep prep. - the chopping, peeling (or in our case the slicing and dicing of data) - putting things into to marinade (letting ideas mature.) 
• Prepare the ingredients - getting everything ready, in the right quantity 
• Assembling everything ready to use - in thinking have all your reference points ready to hand - no more research
• Cook slowly, don’t rush things, stir, let the sauce reduce and relax. 
• Serve, eat, relish and enjoy 

And you know what? Take-away thinking, ready prepared thinking, fast thinking or deep fried thinking just isn’t as good as freshly prepared thinking.

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson is coming out on November 7th 2014