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Open to Think: Do with Applied Thinking, with Dan Pontefract, Leadership Strategist and Author, Open to Think
Applied Thinking for Individuals
Applied thinking inside of the open to think framework is the doing. It’s the way in which we get stuff done. It’s where we take action. But the cautionary tale within applied thinking, of course, is that it’s not the only phase of open to think. It just happens to be one of the more critical ones. You’ve got to be flexible. Remember, you’ve got to have the opportunity potentially to repeat. So the flexibility inside of that moment is maybe there’s another idea. Maybe there’s an action that is competing with you. Maybe there’s a time constraint. So your malleability, your flexibility, in the actual doing is going to be key to you being a great open thinker.
So there’s some questions to ask yourself as an individual in the applied thinking phase, but also a few for the organization. So let’s start with the applied thinker individual. Are you always on? Are you always doing? And if you’re always doing, ironically, you’re not a great open thinker. So you’ve got to ask yourself, how am I employing my time in the action of doing? That’d be step one. But then inside of the act of doing it, you have to ask yourself, am I focused? Am I distracted? So when you’re doing, there’s always other things that are going on. You’re getting emails, you’re getting texts, you’re getting notifications from all your social media streams. Are you in the moment? Are you focused on the doing or have you become distracted and looking at other things? That’s not a good doer. That’s not a good executioner.
That’s not someone who’s going to be a great applied thinker. So your job, your responsibility, is to clear the clutter. Make sure that there’s nothing that’s going to distract you from the actual doing as an individual in that applied thinking stage.
Applied Thinking for Organizations
What about the organization? Have you ever done a time audit to ask yourself, what are my people doing? How much time are they spending in the doing? How much time are they looking at the project management, the meetings, all the actions that go along with the applied thinking? I argue that if organizations aren’t auditing the time of their people, they don’t know actually how much time they’re spending in the applied thinking. And is that good use of their time? Maybe there’s other ways in which the organization can actually use the team members’ time.
Number two, I believe leaders need empathy training. We’ve lost empathy. When open thinkers aren’t humane, when they aren’t empathetic, what’s a leader doing? They’re not caring about the action. They’re not caring about their doing. They just want it done. We need to be a little bit more humane. What does that mean? Put ourselves in the shoes of the employees in the doing phase, in the applied thinking phase. Maybe there’s other things going on in their life. Maybe they’re ill. Maybe their mother’s ill. Maybe they’ve got too many things on the go. Maybe there’s too much doing. Maybe there’s other stress in their life or their work. When leaders aren’t empathetic, the end result can be disastrous for that organization.
And then thirdly, for an organization, distraction training. We don’t know when we’re being distracted anymore. We’ve got new millennials coming in the organization. We’ve got Xers and boomers that don’t know that they become distracted by all the other things that are going on in the doing of applied thinking. So if the organization can say, “Hmm, maybe we should retrain our people so they understand what focus means and what distractions are” then you’ll be a better applied thinking organization.