Advice, tips and inspiration to help you perform at your best
3 is the Magic Number. Yes it is. Del a Soul knew it. Everyone knows it. In numerology, religion, sport, literature and indeed all walks of life, the number 3 has mythical status. Wikipedia explains this in great detail.
So how can we use the power of 3 to our advantage in the world of business?
Here’s (of course) 3 suggestions.
One of my favourite Einstein quotes is
‘If I only had 60 minutes to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 mins thinking about solutions’
We rarely do this. Often, we’re guilty of seeing a problem and immediately jumping to solutions.. Hans Rosling in his book ‘Factfulness’ calls this ‘The Urgency Instinct’. It’s our need to act quickly in the face of an imminent danger. As a consequence we often make bad decisions or follow the wrong course of action. In his experience, decisions are rarely ‘now or never’ and rarely ‘either / or’.
Cognitive bias is the enemy of critical thinking. It restricts our ability to think rationally and make balanced judgements. Unfortunately, we’re all biased. Our points of view are shaped by our upbringing, our experiences, our ethnicity, where we live, what we choose to read, the people we hang out with, the organisation we work for. Wikipedia lists over 180 cognitive biases we all suffer from. Here’s a few of the most common ones.
In a previous post I discussed different ways to read more critically. Part of this is becoming a great notetaker. Note taking whilst listening or reading has enormous benefits. The act of writing stuff down makes it much easier to retain information. There’s much greater engagement with the content or subject matter. It encourages you to reflect as you read. It helps make the subject matter your own. It keeps you focused.
When researching a topic, one of the challenges we face is information overload. Often, we’re so overwhelmed with the volume of reports / links / websites that we don’t know where to begin and can quickly get lost. We dive into each source and can get frustrated by the lack of relevance or lack of progress.
Back in 2007 I was running a 2 day training programme with the Cadbury’s UK marketing team in one of the usual off-site locations. At the end the Marketing Director said to me, ‘do you mind if I show the team a new Dairy Milk ad that we’re thinking of running’. He put his CD into my laptop and played it on the big screen. It featured a man in a gorilla suit playing along to the Phil Collins song ‘In the Air Tonight’. And that was basically it. Then he turned to the room and asked ‘What do you think? Shall we run this?’’
Every day we’re bombarded with information via our twitter feeds, news sites and in-boxes. Being able to discern truth from fiction is a constant battle. To help us write persuasive reports, make informed decisions and to clarify our points of view on the world, an ability to spot flaws in arguments is essential. This is what to look out for.
