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Open to Think: The Three D’s of Open Thinking, with Dan Pontefract, Leadership Strategist and Author, Open to Think
The Three D’s in Theory
What is open thinking and how can you be open to think? Well, there’s three D words I want you to think about: dream, decide, do, and then repeat. Dream, decide, do, repeat. That is the open thinker. An open thinker is one who ultimately employs three types of thinking on a constant daily basis. They are creative thinkers. They stop, they think about their options, they wonder what could be, then they use critical thinking. They make judicious decisions based on facts and evidence and the ideas that they cooked up in creative thinking. But then we all must apply our thinking. So there’s applied thinking to take place. That’s done so in a way that uses the band of brothers between creative and critical thinking. We don’t just jump to apply thinking. We don’t just jump to the doing, but then we reserve the right to repeat. If new evidence, new decisions are needed, or new things pop into our lives, where we have to go back from the doing to more dreaming and deciding, that means we go back to the creative and the critical thinking. It’s not a ball of shame. It’s okay. When we rush through an action without saying, “Hey, maybe I should be able to go back.” Then we’re a poor thinker. We’re a closed thinker. Simultaneously, however, if we sit in creative thinking or we sit in critical thinking, if we do too much dreaming or we don’t make a decision, we’re fence-sitters. We’re indifferent. So the key, the absolute key, to being an open thinker is to remember it’s a cycle. It’s dream, decide, do, and you’re able to repeat that.
The Three D’s in Practice
Let’s put open thinking to action here for a second. Let’s look at an example. Maybe you’ve never heard of the term millinery, but a hat milliner is a woman or a man or a company that makes hats. It’s an old time custom tradition from the late 1700s. How do you make a hat though? Well, in my argument, they are one of the quintessential examples of open thinkers. When you walk into a shop, you sit down with the milliner and you start asking questions about, “Hey, what does this hat look like? What’s your interests? What are your values? Where are you going to use the hat? What’s the occasion? What’s your favorite colors?” And so on. What you’re ultimately doing there is creative thinking. You are looking at options, you’re pausing, you’re ultimately saying, “Huh? How is this going to look?” At that point, you don’t really know. But then the milliner encourages you to start making some decisions. You can’t sit there in perpetuity wondering what the hat may look like. So you’ve got to make that decision about type of felt, color, what type of hat, fedora, pork pie. So you’re making decisions. You are using critical thinking. And then as the milliner begins, they are actually taking the results of your creative thinking and your critical thinking and they got to start making a hat. There is a deadline. So now the milliners are using the steamers. They’re using the sewing machines. They’re using the scissors. They’re using the thread. They’re doing. But then you may come back into the shop one day because it’s time to try it on. So now you’ve gone through creative thinking, critical thinking and applied thinking, you’ve done some dreaming, you’ve made some decisions and you’re doing, and you walk in and you’re like, “Actually, I’m not sure about that feather. Can we try another feather?” What have you just done? You’ve walked back. You’ve walked back into creative and critical thinking. And this is just a hat. So imagine in our organizations. What if we were employing the tricks of the millinery? What if we said, “You know what? To make better projects, to make better innovation, to make better people, to make customers happier, what if we employed the tricks of the millinery? What if we did a little more dreaming and deciding before doing? What if we had a little bit more creative and critical thinking before applied thinking?” That is the art of open thinking. It’s remembering these three types of thinking. And I just say, hats off to milliners.