The QLog

Fifty Year Plan

If you have completed your five year plan, I encourage to craft a 50-Year Plan! Expand your time horizon for half a century and plan out all you would like to be, do, have, learn, see, and experience.

What if you are already 80 years old? Then consider what legacies you would like to leave behind and how could you help\influence\impact your family, friends, community, or the world-at-large in fifty years from beyond the grave.

Of course, this plan is subject to change as the world changes; nevertheless, course corrections are easiest when you are already have your bearings and are heading in a single direction.

A rough outline can be completed within a few hours. A superior Fifty Year Plan will take several weeks to assemble as it will involve personal brainstorming, quite reflection, critical thinking, and strategic planning.

Three C's of Problem Solving: Intro

Although new ideas can be generated and old ideas can be improved with many different methods, I believe that the following three C’s are crucial for problem solving: Content, Context, and Connections.

Here is a skeleton outline of three important tactics that are implemented (often unconsciously) when attempting to solve a problem in novel and better way:

1. Increase the Content

2. Alter the Context
3. Create new Connections

I’ll go over each of these in more depth over the next few days.

Questions, Not Resolutions

“The depth of your questions determines the height of your solutions” – Thom Quinn

This year, focus on better questions. Make QIQO (Quality In, Quality Out) your motto. If you truly want a million dollar answer, I suggest that you ask yourself a million dollar question! Instead of setting a vague resolution, ask ‘how’ you could achieve a specific target and then map out a variety of different potential solutions. Do not accept just one answer! Think of as many as possible and then consider the pros/cons for each solution (cost, energy, time, probability of success, etc.) and choose the best one for your situation. Make 2007 the ‘Year of the Question’.

Avoiding Groupthink

Rub-a-dub-dub,
Three men in a tub;
And who do you think they be?
The butcher, the baker,
The candlestick-maker;
Turn 'em out, knaves all three!

It is common for individuals to seek out people of the same race, gender, educational level, and SES; however, gathering like-minded people is an awful strategy for finding the best solutions to tough problems. Instead, the optimal decisions are achieved through open discussions between a diverse group of people with a wide variety of backgrounds, experiences, and interests. Unfortunetely, few business or governments really understand this very simple truth.

Although the motto un pour tous, tous pour un (all for one, one for all) of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis is wonderful ideal, if I had to make an important decision, I doubt I’d consult with The Three Musketeers and I certainly would not recommend it. They are likely to offer the same ideas and become ‘yes men’ for one another…and groupthink would be a real possibility. Instead, I would want a short meeting with our three knaves above, as I’m sure these three professional would each have something valuable to add the discussion as each one has different concerns and training. And you thought nursery rhymes were just for pre-school kids!

Friday Bonus: The earliest recorded version of “Rub-a-Dub-Dub” is from the 14th century and it tells a much different (and perhaps funnier) story than the one above. Instead, it is short scandalous tale about three respected professions attending a peep-show:

Hey rub-a-dub,
Ho rub-a-dub,
Three maids in a tub,
And who do you think was there?
The butcher, the baker,
The candlestick maker;
And all of them gone to the fair.

Enjoy the weekend!

Productivity 101 (Day 93): Prepare!

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe” – Attributed to Abraham Lincoln

I love the above quote as it makes clear that preparation is a key attribute of highly productive people. Of course, trial and error learning is necessary for any beginners; yet, there are easy ways to get information that will increase your likelihood to succeed. Some include:

• Talk to Experts
• Reading Books
• Attending Seminars
• Review Similar Projects
• Conduct Deep Planning
• Produce Contingency Plans

The larger the project, the more time you should spend planning and learning; however, like the quote above suggests, this does not mean you need to prepare forever. After getting ready, it is time to act swiftly. Avoid the paralysis of analysis and cut down that ‘tree’.

Productivity 101 (Day 28): Brainstorming Redux

“If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.” - Linus Pauling, Nobel Laureate (Twice)


Last Monday, the WSJ published an article that suggested that most brainstorms at most firms do not produce worthwhile results. Brainstorming can be a powerful technique; yet, even the best system does not yield fruit if there are major constraints. At many companies, brainstorming does NOT work. Why?

Habit

The old saw is that “once you learn how to ride a bike, you never forget.” I completely agree that there are many skills that can become second nature once mastered. Learning to ride a bike takes real effort and continual practice. Falling down is part of the process.

Question: How well would you ride a bike if you only were allowed to practice once a year as a child? I will hazard a guess: not very well!

Most teams never get into a creativity habit as a group where ideas are shared out loud. Most teams rarely brainstorm together. Sometimes brainstorming is part of an annual process, but for most corporations, this kind of activity is sporadic. Without practice or getting into this kind of team habit of thinking together, how can one expect to excel at brainstorming? Practice is the key.

Culture

Many teams, departments, and companies are so adverse to failure that real creativity never arises as team members are to afraid of suggesting ‘non-acceptable’ ideas in a public forum, thereby looking foolish and possibility hurting their careers. Instead, only safe, old, or merely incremental ideas are presented. Anywhere where mistakes are viewed as ‘bad’ instead of wonderful learning opportunities is a poor candidate for a successful brainstorming session. An autocratic, overly conservative culture can not be magically suspended for a creative moment. The culture must be open before anything like brainstorming will work.

Linus Pauling’s method for idea generation is preferable for the 21st century, especially if one is really dedicated to finding better answers to old problems.

Also, if individual team members are not full stakeholders in the brainstorming process or the final outcomes, they do not have the complete motivation to take risks and offer their best ideas. This is more of a problem when a special team is assembled for a brainstorm, consisting of people who do not normally work together. It is important that everyone who is part of the brainstorm understands exactly why they are present and how both the problem and the solutions will impact them, both directly and indirectly.

Bottom Line

Brainstorming can work extremely well if and only if an organization has a culture that supports the possibility of breakthrough creativity (and all the potential pitfalls this openness implies) and group activities where ideas are presented publicly occurs frequently. Once again, the benefit of the wildstorming technique I detailed recently is that it improves the overall likelihood of the entire brainstorm process bearing real fruit.


Reference

Sandberg, Jared. Brainstorming Works if People Scramble For Ideas on Their Own. Wall Street Journal.  June 12, 2006, b1

Productivity 101 (Day 15): Try Wildstorming

Wildstorming is a group activity I developed in 2005; it is true play that leads to new breakthroughs, enhanced productivity, and better teams. I'd love for more people to take advantage of it.

Wildstorming is the radical cousin of traditional brainstorming, as it turns the process upside-down and inside-out, where strange and bizarre concepts are the rule.

During a wildstorm session, team members suggest absolutely crazy solutions to the core issue which is being examined. Wildstorms are a great place to ponder ideas that are true overkill or prohibitively expensive. Wildstorm answers can deny physics and logic; they can be weird, fanciful, or even illegal. In fact, they can be impossible! The main rule for a successful wildstorm is that the ideas should be anything but practical.

Wildstorming is both an ‘ice breaker’ for thinking about a problem as well as an exercise for looking at a particular issue from a wide-variety of angles, especially non-traditional ones. 

The remedies discovered during a wildstorming session themselves would probably never be implemented; nevertheless, wildstorms do lead to creative insights on the causes and effects of the core problem. If the three day plan is followed, the end result is novel breakthrough solutions.

Remember: Laughter is encouraged. Wildstorms are fun as they are exercise for the mind.

Please point your browser to wildstorming.com to learn more about how this process works and the overall guidelines for conducting a successful wildstorm.