Altitude Effects Attitude

Take a drive through the beautiful Western North Carolina mountains, especially around Asheville, and you will see why the city adopted the above saying as their tagline.

Chamber of Commerce thinking aside, being aware of your altitude also helps when reviewing your priorities in order to get things done. In order to fully understand your priorities, you meed to know what your work is. Using an aerospace analogy by management consultant David Allen, the conversations you need to be having have a lot to do with altitude:

50,000 feet: Life - this is the "biggest picture" view you can have. Why does your organization exist? The primary purpose for anything provides a core definition of what its "work" really is. All goals, visions, objectives, projects, and actions both derive from this, and lead toward it.

40,000 feet: Three to Five Year Vision - projecting three to five years into the future generates thinking about big categories like organization strategies, trends, and transition circumstances. Decisions at this altitude could easily change what your work might look like on many levels.

30,000 feet: One to Two Year Goals - One to two year goals add a new dimension to defining your work. Meeting goals and objectives often require a shift in emphasis of your job focus.

20,000 feet: Areas of Responsibility - You create or accept most of your projects because of your responsibilities, which for most people can be defined in ten to fifteen categories. These are key areas in which you want to achieve results and maintain standards. Listing and reviewing these responsibilities gives a more comprehensive framework for evaluating your inventory of projects.

10,000 feet: Current Projects - Creating many of the actions that you currently have in front of you are the thirty to one hundred projects on your plate. These are relatively short term outcomes you want to achieve.

Runway: Current Actions - this is the accumulated list of all the actions you need to take - phone calls to make, emails to respond to, errands you need to run, and the agendas you want to communicate to your boss or team.

Though these altitude analogies are somewhat arbitrary, they provide a useful framework to remind you of the multi-layered nature of your "job" and the resulting commitments and tasks it demands.

Mastering the flow of work at all the "altitudes" you experience that work provides a "flight plan" that will help you accomplish a great deal and feel good in the process.

Fasten your seat belts and make sure your tray tables are in the upright and locked position -

...it's time for your framework for decision-making to take flight.

The Problems We Have With Our Thinking

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on thinking, here are some additional comments by Morgan Jones, former CIA analyst and author of "The Thinker's Toolkit".

Troublesome Mental Traits That Produce Analytic Missteps

1. There is an emotional dimension to almost every throught we have and every decision we make.
2. Mental shortcuts our unconscious minds continuously take influence our conscious thinking.
3. We are driven to view the world around us in patterns.
4. We instinctively rely on, and are susceptible to, biases and assumptions.
5. We feel the need to find explanations for everything, regardless of whether the explanations are accurate.
6. Humans have a penchant to seek out and put stock in evidence that support their beliefs and judgements while eschewing and devaluing evidence that does not.
7. We tend to cling to untrue beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence.

Quite a list! So do we even stand a chance to analyze the complexity of our lives and make sound decisions? Jones thinks so - and the remainder of his book outlines 14 tools that will help anyone - not just the CIA - develop a structure for decision-making.

In my service on church staffs, and in consulting with churches now, I quite often turn to these tools to help the decision-making process. I recommend you check out "The Thinker's Toolkit" for a unique collection of proven, practical methods for simplifying any problem and making faster, better decisions every time.

Thinking About Thinking

Have you ever thought about how we think? Since reading Brain Rules and posting on it earlier this year, I have been fascinated by the thought process we go through to make decisions. Here’s a whirlwind tour of some great resources on thinking.

The Thinker’s Toolkit

Former CIA analyst Morgan Jones argues that the single most important factor missing from most decision-making processes is structure. Structure for him means a logical framework in which to focus discussion on key points, keeping it focused so that each element and factor of a problem is analyzed separately, systematically, and sufficiently. Jones goes on to say that humans tend to avoid analytic structure that because structuring one’s analysis is fundamentally at odds with the way the human mind works.

Human beings are problem solvers by nature. Yet in order to reach most solutions, we go through a process of trial and error. In all human affairs, from marriage to marketing to management, success is generally built upon failure. And why some failures are justly attributable to bad luck, most result from faulty decisions based on mistaken analysis.

Here is a list of some of what Jones calls analytic sins:

• We commonly begin our analysis of a problem by formulating our conclusions; we thus start at what should be the end of the analytic process.
• Our analysis usually focuses on the solution we intuitively favor; we therefore give inadequate attention to alternative solutions.
• Not surprisingly, the solution we intuitively favor is, more often than not, the first one that seems satisfactory.
• We tend to confuse “discussion/thinking hard” about a problem with “analyzing” it, when in fact the two activities are not at all the same.
• We focus on the substance (evidence, arguments, and conclusions) and not on the process of our analysis.
• Most people are fundamentally illiterate when it comes to structuring their analysis.
  

If we take a structured approach in thinking, the mind remains open, enabling one to examine each element of the decision or problem separately. The outcome is almost always more comprehensive and more effective than following our instincts alone.

Six Thinking Hats

This scenario has been repeated thousands of times, maybe in your organization this week: You are facing a big problem. A decision made months ago has now caused sharply declining results. A big meeting has been called, and all the staff enters the conference room with something different on their mind.

Your R&D department has an armful of charts, research, and data depicting the path of the project. The creative department has sketched up a new campaign that improves the message. The marketing manager is unsure if he will be around after the meeting. And the office manager smugly recalls how she suggested it was a bad idea to begin with.

The meeting quickly turns into a discussion that even more quickly becomes an argument about whose perspective has more merit. Each person’s emotional attachment to their point of view and their verbal commitment to their position makes considering other options difficult. The team leader knows that the way through the impasse is to consider a wide range of options.

To move just such a discussion forward, Edward De Bono, in “Six Thinking Hats,” delineates six clear directions, or hats, that represent a particular line of human thought. To each hat he assigns a color, and just like the hat, one puts on that line of thinking to consider the problem at hand.

• White is neutral and objective – the white hat is concerned with objective facts and figures.


• Red suggests anger, rage, and emotions – the red hat gives the emotional view.


• Black is somber and serious – the black hat is cautious and careful; it points out the weakness in an idea.


• Yellow is sunny and positive – the yellow hat is optimistic and covers hope and positive thinking.


• Green is grass, growing and abundant, fertile growth – the green hat indicates creativity and new ideas.


• Blue is cool, the color of the sky, which is above everything else – the blue hat is concerned with control, the organization of the thinking process, and the use of the other hats.

Six Hats thinking allows participants to focus their energy in a specific direction by getting everyone to “wear” one hat at a time.

DeBono rightly states that “the biggest enemy of thinking is complexity, for that leads to confusion.” His six hat method of discussion allows the exploration of a topic in a natural and objective manner. The conversational method makes the material easier to internalize and apply. It is an effective way to organize your meetings so that they actually initiate progress rather than create more roadblocks.

I’ve been able to use Six Hats thinking to help groups step back from an emotionally-charged issue and approach it from a rational, thinking direction. In every case, the results have been simply amazing. Most people have the capacity to look at a situation in a different perspective. It only takes a leader to help them find the right “hat” to wear in the discussion.

Have you tried being a hat-maker lately?