Are you feeling lost in the forests of too much information, so lost that you can no longer see the individual trees with their trunks of clarity, their branches of discernment or the insight that seems to flicker through the leafy canopy ?
No wonder the most effective leaders continue to sharpen their decision-making protocol beyond the classic seven-step problem-solving process, beyond: (1) Collection, (2) beyond Selection, (3) beyond Investigation, (4) beyond Determination, (5) beyond Inspection, (6) beyond Execution and (7) beyond Evaluation. The most effective leaders overcome the 8 barriers to thinking long before launching into the classic seven-step problem-solving process.
Think of the word THINKING as an acrostic to help you more readily remember to hurdle these eight barriers to effective thinking and enhance your leadership.
T
Tunnel vision: We limit our scope to only the urgent not the important.
H
History: We tend to base our future action on past experience.
I
Information Overload: We tend to keep looking for more and more information.
N
- Numbers : We’re too quick to play the odds of what to focus on.
K
Knowledge: We react only to what we already know.
I
Inundated: We’re too busy to take the time to think.
N
Notation: We’re too quick to act on the last thing we noted, saw or read.
G
–Generalize: We tend to jump to conclusions from a small sample.
The most insidious of these eight barriers is information overload. Like a dog gnawing on a bone, we can fool ourselves into thinking that chewing on the same thing over and over again nourishes without digestion. Then we parlay that information to make our decisions for us -not by us.
“Data don’t make decisions, people do,” noted Harvard professor Ellen Langer in her book Mindfulness. “Decision-making is independent of data gathering.” Leaders make decisions strategically after jumping over these eight barriers to effective THINKING.
To more fully hone your skills in jumping over these eight barriers to thinking more creatively, more productively and more profitably, pick up a copy of THINKING Like a Leader, With Clarity - a Leadership Mints Series book
THINKING Like a Leader, With Clarity is the first book in the Leadership Mints Series that develops your sense of purpose and perspective in creating, concentrating and collaborating.
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Consumed like a breath mint — quick and on-the-go — a Leadership Mint is a bite-sized idea that freshens your feeling for leading and personalizes leadership principles so they are more easily remembered, more readily acted upon and more fully applied. And like its candy counterpart, Leadership Mints are easily accessed, quickly savored and immediately satisfying.
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