GUEST POST from Janet Sernack
In our last blog, we proposed, rather than living in a world where everyone hates to fail, why not adopt a rethink, respond, regroup, thrive pattern, and experience failure as an opportunity for change, unlearning, and re-thinking? Adopting this approach supports your human-centricity and enables you to become future-fit through developing your set of 21st-century superpowers in the face of the acute disruption of COVID-19. This is reinforced by Adam Grant, in his book “Think Again” (the power of not knowing what you don’t know) where he states that we are living in a time vital for re-thinking to help us become adaptive and agile and develop our future fitness to thrive in a disruptive, uncertain world.
Critical Art of Re-Thinking
The critical art of re-thinking involves being actively open-minded, hearted, and willed:
- To learning, and possibly re-learning how to effectively question your own beliefs, mindsets, assumptions, opinions, and habits;
- Through connection, association, detachment, and discernment to these qualities in other people’s minds and hearts;
- And to then put our “mental pliability” and “emotional agility” to the test by creating the time and space for re-thinking with a new “set of goggles” and revising our views based on what we learn.
This potentially benefits everyone because it allows us to upgrade and update our points of view and expand our understanding of the world, we are all living in today and build our future fitness.
It also positions us for change innovation and excellence in the way we transform our approach to work and share our wisdom in life.
Making time and space for re-thinking
- The vital role of unlearning
Embracing human-centricity and a future-fit focus involves unlearning and letting go of many of our old beliefs, mindsets, assumptions, opinions, and habits embedded in our habitual feeling and thinking systems.
Being able to discern which of these are now incomplete, ineffective, and irrelevant as we adapt, and serve people, teams, and organisations to survive, grow, and develop future fitness to thrive in the post-Covid-19 world.
Unlearning is not about forgetting, it’s about paying deep attention and developing the awareness to see, and safely and courageously step outside of our old thinking systems, mental models, biases, and paradigms.
- Being intellectually humble
Being intellectually humble involves “knowing what we don’t know” and being inquisitive and curious enough to explore new discoveries, and pay deep attention, and be consciously aware of the rich and valuable rewards to be found in the “unknown”.
Most of us are unconsciously motivated to move away from change and learning as a result of “blindness” to our learning or survival anxieties (Schein), and the need to cover up our “learning incompetence” (when people pretend to know things they don’t).
The willingness to be actively open-minded, hearted, and willed and embrace intellectual humility helps us see things clearly and moves us towards overcoming our blind spots and weaknesses.
Re-Thinking in a Disconnected and Disruptive Era
Daniel Kahneman, in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” describes the “machinery of … thought,” dividing the brain into two agents, called System 1 and System 2, which “respectively produce fast and slow thinking.”
For our purposes, at ImagineNation™, in our group, leadership, and team coaching programs, these can also be thought of as intuitive and deliberate thought.
- Introducing System 3 thinking
My colleague, Peter Webb (www.peterjwebb.com), has added to this work by researching and validating a System 3 which he describes as considerative, which is complementary to our approach to thinking differently at ImagineNation™.
- System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. it is intuitive, quick, and emotional.
- System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration. It is deliberative in that is rational and calculated.
- System 3 thinking is more considerative, thoughtful, and consequential in that it enables you to focus on what really matters, discern what makes common sense, make small decisions and take small actions to find out what works best, be compassionate, regulate your emotions and develop a tolerance for divergent values.
You can explore more these three thinking systems, and initiate your own re-thinking process by contacting Peter at https://www.peterjwebb.com/
Initiating Your Re-Thinking Strategy
- Developing a habit of reflective practices
Our innovation coaching, leading, and teaming learning programs involve developing a regular reflective practice –which according to Turner, Lucas & Whitaker, in the learning and coaching context is:
“the ability to step away from your work and identity patterns, habits, strengths, and limitations in your work, and/within the system you work in.”
- Pause-retreat-reflect cycle to catalyse re-thinking
At ImagineNation™ to initiate the re-thinking process, through partnering with clients to be actively open-minded, hearted, and willed through our “pause-retreat-reflect-reboot” cycle.
To support the development of the new habit, we include:
- A personal reflection practice involves initiating or continuing a mindfulness activity.
- A set of regular reflection activities which include different sets of reflective and generative questions.
- Journaling processes, incorporating the CCS Cards for play and critical reflection for our clients to experiment with.
This involves practicing a set of regular retreat and reflection activities involving safely and intentionally enabling people to deeply listen and question and paradoxically dance across the 3 thinking systems simultaneously.
Enhancing your own and your team’s capability to do this will transform your approach to work, harness people’s collective intelligence to share their wisdom in life with the world, and develop future fitness to master challenges and solve problems as they arise.
- Interrupt their habitual “do-feel-think” cycles (doing stuff that may not deliver the results you want, feeling the awful emotions that result from mistakes, imperfection, and failure, then thinking what to do about it).
- Create “stop signals” to affect a pause, long enough to stop doing stuff and become present to the range of emotions to calm down their nervous system.
- Connect, associate with and acknowledge how they might be feeling at this unique and specific moment in time.
- Pay deep attention to observing their operating thought patterns, with detachment and discernment.
- Intentionally choose a desired future state or outcome.
- Consider the impact of their feelings and thoughts on the results they are getting.
- Deliberate, consider and quickly choose more resourceful visceral and feeling states that compels (pulls) and mobilise them to achieve the desired future state or outcome.
- Finally, deliberate, consider and quickly choose more resourceful thought and feeling patterns to choose the most intelligent actions to take to achieve the desired future state or outcome.
The result is usually the development of a re-thinking process that has evolved from “do-think-feel” to “feel-think-do” (connecting to a desirable outcome, feeling present, thinking about the most intelligent thoughts and actions to embody and enact to get there, saving both time and money on wasted activities, avoiding mistakes and failures, to get to their desired future state.)
A Final Word on the Benefits of Re-Thinking
Taking just a moment to pause-retreat-reflect catalyses our rethink, respond, regroup, thrive pattern and creates opportunities for change, unlearning, and re-thinking. It is also a vital ingredient towards developing peoples’ future fitness.
Enabling us to appreciate the value of tuning into ourselves and into others, to leverage our emotional and mental muscles, towards actively creating the space for evoking and provoking different options and creative choices. Which better enable and empower us to re-think about being, thinking, and acting differently in a new age, impacted by the technologies created by accelerated digitization.
We can then perform at higher levels, achieve our desired outcomes and goals, interact, lead and team more effectively and develop functional and highly valued collaborative relationships with others, as well as with stakeholders and customers.
To leverage the current turning point, and develop our 21st-century superpowers, to co-create a more equitable, resilient, sustainable, human-centric, and future-fit environment, within an ever-changing landscape.
Join Our Next Free “Making Innovation a Habit” Masterclass to Re-Engage 2022!
Our 90-minute masterclass and creative conversation will help you develop your post-Covid-19 re-engagement strategy. It’s on Thursday, 10th February at 6.30 pm Sydney and Melbourne, 8.30 pm Auckland, 3.30 pm Singapore, 11.30 am Abu Dhabi and 8.30 am Berlin. Find out more.
Image credit: Unsplash
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For more than a decade I’ve devoted myself to making innovation insights accessible for the greater good, because I truly believe that the better our organizations get at delivering value to their stakeholders the less waste of natural resources and human resources there will be.
