#ThinkfullyHabit: Experiment wickedly
What happens if you are faced with a problem where you can't define the objectives in advance and there’s no apparent ‘right’ answer? What if there’s not enough known about the goals or that things feel too tangled and complex to work out?
There are some problems which can’t be solved very well through using the usual route of identifying the objectives, defining the desirable outcomes and working through a series of scheduled tasks to get there. The Psychologist Gary Klein recognised these as ‘wicked problems’ that need managing in a different way*. It’s these problems where experiments may be the only way to find the route forward.
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#ThinkfullyHabit: Take a chance
How often have things in your life been influenced by a chance encounter or a happy accident? Chances are there's been a few.
Happy accidents have had a huge influence on our lives. Take Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin by chance after he went on holiday in 1928 without washing away his bacteria samples and on return found bacteria fighting fungus growing in his absence.
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#ThinkfullyHabit: Think ahead
Do you find yourself in more and more situations where it is nearly impossible to accurately predict or forecast the future? If so, and you find yourself either freezing and unable to respond due to the uncertainty, or leaping forward blindly, then it might serve you well to switch your focus towards speculating what possible outcomes may happen next.
How you think ahead turns out to be quite crucial. A helpful way is to actively anticipate for future outcomes and prepare for potential problems and opportunities. This is different from predicting or forecasting the future, and certainly distinct from guessing what might come next. So, what makes it different? It's when we proactively tune in to emerging patterns, recognise threats or promising signs, extrapolate trends and run through potential consequences - essentially, it’s about being able to imagine a range of possible futures and go on a mental time travel through them all.
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#ThinkfullyHabit: Look behind you
History may seem irrelevant when we face such novel times. However, what if history is more helpful in navigating the new normal than we may instantly give it credit for?
Timothy Snyder, History Professor, Yale University and Author of The Road to Unfreedom* makes a good case for stealing from the past to get ahead, on the basis that history provides a unique vantage point to see what patterns are coming together. He argues that if you can see the patterns that might be forming and understand how those patterns have played out in the past, you can intervene and start working with those patterns to shape the future.
So, what if looking behind us to the past could be more fruitful than we expect. What if we viewed history as a valid resource for helping us work out what happens next?
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#ThinkfullyHabit: Jump from conclusions
We have a tendency to jump to conclusions and to stop exploring the facts and information earlier than we should. We like answers to questions; and as efficiently as possible. It’s even truer in times of greatest uncertainty, so in the current climate this is something we need to be evermore aware of. Jumping to conclusions too soon can mean leaping to premature answers based on what seem to be reasonable (but often incorrect) assumptions, all because we want to resolve uncertainty.
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#ThinkfullyHabit: Incubate Ideas
At a time when many are in lock down, with the usual routines gone and people left trying to work out new ways of spending their time, what if we used this time to tackle problems differently too?
Studies show that incubating ideas substantially increases our likelihood of solving a problem. Interestingly, this is most likely with longer incubation periods and when not cognitively overloaded with tasks*. So if you find yourself facing longer periods of time indoors and with less routine or demanding work to occupy your mind, you may be able to make particular use of this habit to incubate ideas.
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#ThinkfullyHabit: Speak up
Have you ever stopped yourself putting forward a view or an idea, assuming that someone else has already thought of it? Or felt that an idea was too obvious and didn't need saying because you’d expect everyone else to be thinking the same thing?
It turns out that we can be poor at judging how valuable our ideas are and not very good at evaluating how unique our ideas may actually be.
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#ThinkfullyHabit: Alright me duck
Rubber ducking is a concept that is likely to be most familiar to those in the computer programming world as a way to help debug codes. The term comes from a story in the book ‘ The Pragmatic Programmer'* in which a programmer carries around a rubber duck and forces themselves to explain their code line-by-line to the duck, with the aim of helping find the bugs.
Even if we don’t write code, many of us will have had the experience of explaining a problem out loud, only to be hit by an idea for a solution part way through. Somehow, simply talking the problem out loud and in detail helps get to a new idea.
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