#ThinkfullyHabit: Beware the hippo in the room
Ever been in the scenario where the opinion of most senior person in the room tramples over everything else regardless of what others think or what the evidence suggests? In this case you're at the mercy of the Hippo.
The Hippo is the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. Avinash Kaushik first coined the term in his book ‘Web Analytics: An Hour a Day', to describe how people respond when there’s a lack of data. His observation was that when the person with the highest status gives their view, what they say goes.
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#ThinkfullyHabit: Doodle? Do!
What's your typical doodle? Flowers? Houses? Stars? Faces? These are amongst the most common. Or are you someone who finds themselves scribbling the same abstract or geometric shapes over and over in different ways? Whatever your preference, you’re not alone in your doodles.
While scribbling in the margins, shading in the shapes and creating random patterns doesn’t sound particularly productive, there may actually be cognitive benefits of doodling.
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#ThinkfullyHabit: Dream on
In February 1869 Dmitri Mendeleev had a dream. It turned out to be quite an important dream which delivered an important outcome – the periodic table. Mendeleev had been working tirelessly to solve an incredibly complex problem: how to logically organise all the known elements in the universe. He had created a set of cards of all the elements that he would regularly shuffle and deal, with the hope that he find the rules that would explain how they all fitted together. He did this repeatedly and failed to crack the code. However, it was his dreaming brain that eventually solved what his awake brain could not.
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#ThinkfullyHabit: Check it out
Should we trust our intuition or be guided by analysis? There’s an unspoken tug of war that often exists – maybe within yourself, amongst your colleagues or inside your organisation. Do you look for the evidence, trust the data and focus on the stats? Or do you go with your gut, follow your hunch and trust your instincts? The best answer is to stop the tug of war, drop the rope and make the best use of both. In complex, non life and death situations where we don’t have to make instant judgements, it's essential to pause long enough to check out our intuitions.
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#ThinkfullyHabit: Be bored
When was the last time you were bored; when those little moments and tiny cracks in the day were left unfilled – while waiting for the lift, queuing for a sandwich or arriving early for a meeting? Do you allow boredom to creep in, or are spaces quickly filled with snippets of news, a quick text or a catch up post?
We crave stimulus and it’s only when we can’t find it externally that our minds tend to create it internally; sparking innovative ideas and solutions.
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#ThinkfullyHabit: Go solo and social
Do we get our best ideas alone or in groups?
When we’re alone our minds are free to wander and we can mull over ideas without distraction from others. We’re also freed from the constraints and problems of groups, such as not being able to express ideas equally, being prone to Groupthink if there’s not the diversity of views in the room, and worrying about the balance of introverts and extroverts, along with other group dynamic issues. However, if we only grapple with ideas individually, we may miss opportunities for new ideas that are sparked after being exposed to the ideas of others.
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#ThinkfullyHabit: Draw your own conclusions
Drawing can help reveal patterns more clearly, explore ideas more fully and imagine alternative outcomes more easily. We are not talking about being an artist or drawing a piece of artwork, we are talking about visualising what we are trying to make sense of – whether through diagrams, sketches, flow charts or visual representations. It’s not about aesthetics or creating an outcome in its own right, it’s about tapping into visuals as an alternative to language.
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#ThinkfullyHabit: Bite your tongue
At first, new ideas often sound a little naïve, insubstantial or full of vulnerability. If we are always quick to jump on all the problems straight away, ideas can’t go on to develop and reform into stronger, workable or more interesting solutions. In particular, if we dismiss ideas for being too different, it may mean we never get far from thinking and doing the same old things that we’ve always done. The implications? Treat ideas a little more gently at first, especially if they are a little different - and then evaluate them rigorously once they are more fully formed.
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