What kind of thinking gets things done?
I am a recovering academic with a passion for sparking thinking about thinking. What is the difference between the thoughts that are content to wander through our minds and the thoughts that turn into tangible results? How does thinking change in the presence of other minds? What is it like to think without words?
If you have ever surprised yourself, this lens will have clues to why. To know how the human brain functions is to begin to know ourselves. Neuroscience is still very new. It gives us the beginning of an idea how our brains work. Philosophy, psychology and the arts contribute more ideas about how our minds work. When we put ideas about the brain and mind together, we begin to practice critical, integrated thinking.
It seems that the activity in our brains is the catalyst for the results that we get. Changing our minds changes our lives. Think about how you will change yours next.
5 Reasons to Think about Thinking in Business
Ask yourself these questions
- Who owns the thinking in your business? If you don't know, it's probably not you.
- How do you take ownership of what you know and what you think? Hint: if you keep it entirely to yourself, it has no economic value.
- How do you leverage the top performers in your company? If you're not learning from them, you're not leveraging their value.
- How do you motivate yourself? When you know what inspires your best thinking, you'll know what inspires your best performance.
- How long would you stay in business without new thinking every day? Enough said.
Making Good Choices
Stumbling on Happiness
I've only read the foreword so far and I've already laughed out loud several times. The author says his intent is to interest and amuse [us] provided [we] don't take [ourselves] too seriously and have at least ten minutes to live. Do you have the right qualfications to read this book?
Amazon Price: $10.17 (as of 11/23/2008) 
The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Older
What is the difference between encountering something new and recognizing an established pattern? If you have ever wondered about how your thinking changes as your experience grows, read this book.
Amazon Price: $11.25 (as of 11/23/2008)
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
All around you, people are making choosing the best from a short list of bad options, choosing to make lists instead of decisions, or just plain stuck. This is a great exploration of what makes people comfortable enough to make a choice.
Amazon Price: $11.16 (as of 11/23/2008)
The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking
Amazon Price: $17.79 (as of 11/23/2008)
new at ntgr8
blog entries on thinking, perception and getting things done
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byHow do you own thinking?
It's one of the central problems of business in North America. As we sell services and ideas - instead of widgets - we need better ways of thinking about how to own thinking.The person who can replicate a pattern of thinking owns it. Put another way: if I can think it, then I own the thinking. A business cannot own thinking - however the accountants may work around "intangible assets." A business can create a culture where thinking is shared, a culture in which more people own the same thinking.
Let's put it this way: pretend thinking is a red ball. If only one person in your business can carry the red ball, then you are at risk. If you sell something that requires the red ball, you are vulnerable because you could lose that one person. If you do not sell anything that requires the red ball, you are at risk because you are not making the most of your potential. The only way not to be at risk is to create more red balls and more people capable of carrying them.
In order to replicate the red ball that is thinking, you have to know what it looks like and what it's made of. You have to be able to observe it when it is still and to observe it when it is in motion. You have to know thinking.
A Note on Buying Books
If you are visiting from Canada, you can click Amazon.ca. I like Amazon - if they had not pioneered book shopping on the web, I would own many, many fewer books.
I also like www.chapters.indigo.ca because, as a Canadian, I will usually choose to support Canadian companies, particularly in cultural industries. I shop at Chapters frequently enough to have a lifetime membership to their customer loyalty program.
As good as online shopping is for somethings, nothing can replace the joy of browsing shelves that have been stocked by someone who loves to read. You can always tell. So in addition to whatever you notice here, go to a local independent bookseller - wherever you live - and buy a book.
Books are always good for thinking.
Thinking at work
Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win
Amazon Price: $17.79 (as of 11/23/2008)
Strategy Bites Back: It Is Far More, and Less, than You Ever Imagined
Amazon Price: (as of 11/23/2008)
Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality
Amazon Price: $16.47 (as of 11/23/2008)
A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
Amazon Price: $10.20 (as of 11/23/2008)
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
Amazon Price: $17.99 (as of 11/23/2008)
The Power of Intention/The Power of Attention
What we notice changes what we do
- If you wanted to enjoy a fine meal, you would pay attention to the way it smelled, the way it looked, the way the different flavours and textures combined. Allow yourself to notice one of your strengths with the same quality of attention.
- It's easy to say you don't trust anybody. It's more useful to notice that you trust some people some of the time. Pay attention to the qualities of the people and situations in which trust works for you.
- Focus on a situation or aspect of your life where you are successful. Notice the other people involved in that success. Pay attention to the way interaction creates the possibility for success.
- There are mixed messages that lead us to new achievments and mixed messages that keep us stuck. Pay attention to the mixed messages that convinced you to do something you thought was impossible.
- Play a game. Draw a graph that represents your life story, then draw a mark that shows where you are now. Is it a high point or a low point? What comes next?
Sites that promote thinking
- NLP Canada Training Inc.
- Information about courses and free resources for people who like to think.
- ntgr8
- Linda's blog. Short pieces that invite a moment of reflection.
- Steven Johnson
- Great, accessible thinking about thinking
- Fast Company
- Thinking about what makes business work for people
- Malcolm Gladwell
- Thinking in the blink of an eye
- Paul Ekman
- Thinking about what makes us all human together
- Anne Lamott at Salon
- Moments of thinking from a woman of faith and uncertainty and humour.
- Harvard Business Online
- Need I say more? Often the ideas are less interesting and the thinking less nuanced than they should be. Often, complicated ways of supporting the status quo. Still, you sometimes find a gem and you can always sound smarter by quoting it!
- Henry Mintzberg
- Provocative, rigorous and - surprisingly - fun, at least from time to time.
- TED
- I just found this site and I love this site! Much fun if you would rather think by video than by books.
Visit an NLP Canada Training Inc. event in Toronto
Events that make thinking fun!
Fetching RSS feed... please stand by5 Reasons for Thinking about Thinking
What changes when thinking changes?
- You're willing to consider the possibility that thinking matters. You don't know if thinking changes the world, and you would like to know.
- It's time for a change and you want to know what that means and where it will take you.
- Connections matter to you, the connections you make with ideas and those you make with other people.
- You want to improve and you want to achieve. You know these are two different steps.
- You want to be part of something bigger than yourself while remaining recognizably yourself.
Would you rather be safe or effective?
Sometimes formalities get in your way
People make the same choices in their work. Most people spend most of each day doing what they always do because they always do it and because it has "always" been done that way. This has two advantages: it makes them feel safe, and it meets the expectations of the people around them. One particularly insidious form of this is the need to behave 'like a professional' - even when that means being less connected, less creative, and less effective than the alternatives.
Imagine this: every time you begin to act automatically as a professional, you are standing at a crossroads. The road to one side is marked "unlikely to change" and the road to the other side is marked "only difference gets different results." Which one will you choose? How does the signpost change your perception of what it means to be professional?
Now imagine that you are a client, looking at the person standing at the crossroads. How does the choice look from there?
Thinking without words
- Clear your mind. Send all your attention to the periphery by looking and listening at the edge of your perception. Your words stop (and your best thinking starts) as your attention moves outside yourself.
- Get moving. Your mind can't be stuck if your body is moving forward. Leave your words at your desk and take a walk.
- Practice listening. Put on some music; go to a cafe and listen to the sounds of people talking; or become thoroughly engaged in what someone else is saying.
- Look up. It's hard to be bored, stuck or unhappy with your chin up and your eyes on the horizon.
- Go outside. If you want fresh, outside-the-box thinking, take yourself out to think under the skies or under the stars. Find a wide open space with a nice fresh breeze.
How do two or more people think together?
Let's think about this
As long as a thought remains in your brain, it generates nothing but a little electrical activity. Thinking only becomes active and useful when it starts to move out into the rest of your being - generating words and actions.
What if that's still not the whole story? What if thinking only really happens when someone adds to your thought? My "thinking" here isn't really mine at all: it's the product of what I thought, what I generated through that thought, and what you added to put it into your head as you read. What changes the world is not "my thinking" or "your thinking" - it's our thinking together.
Great Reading
Books with a commitment to paying attention
These are books I've read that have left me a little more wide awake, a little more fully myself, and a little more engaged with other people.
Music for thinking
Essential Mozart: 32 Of His Greatest Masterpieces
Almost everyone has now read reports of the research on Listening to Mozart and improving your thinking. Try it! It's amazingly cost-effective.
Amazon Price: $10.99 (as of 11/23/2008)
Beethoven: Piano Sonatas
Notice how these sonatas move your attention: the music moves and your attention grows still, focused, and clear.
Amazon Price: $6.99 (as of 11/23/2008)
BBC Sessions
You thought this would be all classical? I regularly have clients listen to Stairway to Heaven to understand how different voices come together in a single achievement.
Amazon Price: $22.99 (as of 11/23/2008)
Hymns of the 49th Parallel
Listen to Lang sing Cohen. Let everything else slip from your mind. Come back to your own life clearer.
Amazon Price: $13.99 (as of 11/23/2008)
Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday
We all need more jazz in our thinking: the ability to play and innovate with others through a structure that frees us. Want to maintain integrity while doing something new? Listen to some classic jazz.
Amazon Price: $13.97 (as of 11/23/2008)
Getting Outside Yourself
Thinking can provide perspective and something extra
One of the best reasons to think about thinking is to imagine a perspective that remains constant and true no matter what is happening to you, in you or around you. At NLPCT, we think of this kind of perspective as a lodestar - a star that sailors use to navigate. Your gut reactions are always inside a situation - a lodestar allows you to imagine stepping outside it and taking a look of a bigger picture.The great disciplines - the arts, the sciences, engineering - all provide a lodestar for people who pursue them. They present a set of values and principles against which situations can be judged and choices evaluated. Faith, tradition and family can also function as lodestars, a constant, shining presence that allows you to know where you are in relation to where you want to go next.
Thinking brings things into being before they are real. Thinking also allows us to step outside the limited reality in which we are engaged so that we can take a look from higher ground. Lodestars only guide us when we look up and find them. We can only look up by thinking.
Think with more parts of your brain
Apply all possible resources to getting what you want
If you think about thinking in evolutionary terms, it makes sense that the thinking that creates the best fit between different parts of your brain activity is likely to be most successful. That means that you think best when your senses, your emotions, your language and your reasoning are all working in the same direction.
You know how to build a stronger analysis by developing logic and evidence. Now learn how you build a stronger analysis by actively engaging more parts of your brain with the problem you are solving or the opportunity you are creating. How does it change your thinking when you get up and move around while thinking? How does it change your thinking when you add sensory experience to an analysis (another way of thinking about metaphor)?
The only way to find out is to try it.
Lodestar Reading
Books that get you to the top of the mountain
These are books, fiction, non-fiction and poetry that I use as lodestars - they remind me there are consistent, constant values that I can serve through my actions and beliefs.
Why is criticism almost always negative?
It's not hard to notice mistakes
Take this challenge. For one day, notice everytime you observe something good - something strong or pleasing or simply something that works. William Morris said that you should have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. Apply that kind of thinking throughout your day, noticing what is beautiful, useful or strong.
It is easy to notice what is wrong: it sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb. It takes discernment to notice what is working. Try it and find out how discerning you really are.
Reading minds is like reading poetry
- In a poem, selected images convey emotional and conceptual content. The way a person looks also conveys emotional and conceptual content. How much can you learn about a person's mind from the way he or she is dressed? From his or her expression?
- In a poem, you pay attention to rhythms. The rhythm is more than the beat; it indicates motifs and variations on themes and meanings. Pay attention to a person: notice the rhythms in his/her speech and movement.
- In a poem, repetition is important. Words are understood to be in short supply - using the same word, image or concept more than once indicates that attention must be paid. When someone repeatedly uses the same words, attitudes or phrases, attention can be paid. What looks different in light of the repetition?
- A poem's meaning is indicated precisely by the properties that emerge from the unique pattern of words it holds. It cannot be summarized without distortion. People's minds are like that, too. They hold exactly what they hold - and the properties that emerge are dependent on that precise combination. Simplifying them falsifies them.
- To appreciate a poem, you must recognize its particular beauty. In some poems, this is a matter of lovely images - in other, it is more complicated. The same is true of people. When you recognize the particular quality of their individual beauty, you can begin to appreciate them in both their force and their complexity.
Summer reading
The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning
I finished this book this week and strongly recommend it to everyone who is interested in helping other people acquire skills or make decisions - that includes managers and sales professionals as well as teachers.
Amazon Price: $16.47 (as of 11/23/2008)
Speaker's Meaning
This book is short and relatively old and interesting. It deals with the difference between the lexical (dictionary) meaning of words and the speaker's meaning. Its arguments may slide through your mind, but they are likely to simmer for a long time on the back burner. You won't notice them, and they'll make you sharper for having integrated them.
Amazon Price: $34.95 (as of 11/23/2008)
Conversations with Milton H. Erickson, Volume I: Changing Individuals (Norton Professional Books)
This probably won't work for the typical business reader, but its message is critical for anyone who needs to think strategically or manage change: everything begins in very precise observation guided by a general intention to make something stronger. You can't influence anyone without paying attention - with precision and effort and intention.
Amazon Price: $23.82 (as of 11/23/2008)
Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition)
Amazon Price: $13.57 (as of 11/23/2008)
Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
Amazon Price: $12.24 (as of 11/23/2008)
Reader Feedback
Share what you're thinking today
What aspects of thinking catch your attention? What would you like to know about how you know and how you make decisions? What would you like other people to know?
TomATS wrote...
Linda,
You've got some good,helpful points here. I'm adding this lens to "Feature Lenses" in my some of my lenses to benefit my readers.
Posted April 22, 2008
reasonablerobinson wrote...
This is a really helpful lens, loads of great links and book resources- superb! Cheers RR UK
Posted October 16, 2007
financegirls wrote...
hmmm, this is very thought-provoking!I am a firm believer in the power of the mind and positivism, Great topic!If you have time please feel free to drop by lens sometime The Benefits of Secured Credit Cards
Have a great day!
Posted April 17, 2007
