Frame Your Thoughts
Frame thinking by asking the right questions.
It’s hard to just imagine things.
Find the tools that facilitate your thinking.
So many of the answers we seek, we already know. They just spin around in the washing machine that is our brain on repeat.
We need to regularly create opportunities to get those ideas out of our brains and move the thinking forward.
It’s honestly one of the main reasons I do these regular posts. If it creates value for you, or others then that’s a great secondary gain, but for me it helps me deeply think about complicated topics, themes and ideas.
So many of the ideas that spin around in our brains are the same ideas over and over. But we don’t talk about those deepest ideas so often. Most of the ideas we have we don’t even have the language to articulate.
We might have lots of opportunities to talk about sport or the weather but how often do you get to talk to someone about your deepest curiosities and complex structures like learned helplessness, failure, and whether where you park your car sends a message to people about how important you think you are?
Emotive Modeler
Without getting too meta, one of my favourite things from my first visit to MIT Media Lab (I totally recognise the privilege of having had multiple visits) was a 3D printed exhibition.
Emotive Modeler was a Media Lab experiment that resulted in a UI which took the emotional associations of words and created 3D models to reflect the emotive character of even complex emotive adjectives.
This way of thinking about emotions was something I had never thought about in my life, but it felt so instinctively right.
Trust was heavily grounded, guilt was asymmetrical, despair looked like it would topple over at any moment.
We learn to communicate complicated feelings as we get to understand them better, develop our own voices, and identify where those feelings come from.
Since seeing this exhibit I totally changed the way I saw the way that emotions are experienced, and how to recognise the varied ways that people react to different situations.
A lot of meditation and mindfulness training urges you to recognise where in your body you feel discomfort when presented with different situations.
We use language like “gut instinct” or “going with our heart” but there’s a lot of disconnect from that world and what we currently recognise as the “real world”.
Facilitated thinking is about finding the prompts that turn those ideas that spin around into statements that capture and reflect how we truly feel.
These tools can help us to make sense of emotions that are complicated and contradictory.
We need to fully listen to ourselves when we’re trying to unpick knotty problems, but we can’t beat ourselves up when we can’t quite find the words or form get across what is important to us.
There’s a lot of anxiety that comes from this, whether it is running an argument over in our heads in advance of a crucial meeting, or walking away from a conversation and feeling completely unheard.
This feeling of not being fully heard or understood can consume us and lead to further spiralling thoughts.
Don’t worry if they don’t get it, they also have a mental model that you need to navigate. This is a lesson I really still need to learn myself. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been in a meeting and fixated on one point that it is clearly not important but that bugs me personally.
I’ll write more in the future about the feeling of acknowledgement and why it is so important to us, but it can really cause us a lot of inner torment.
You don’t need to convince everyone to gain peace.
Capturing How You Really Feel
There are plenty of tools out there that you can use to get those thoughts out there but I really think the best tool is a blank piece of paper, a pen, a lot of patience and paused cynicism.
If the ideas don’t flow, you have two options:
Wait or don’t wait.
Waiting is always best, but you need to learn a bunch of other skills to do this well. A good way to test if you can do this well is to gauge how comfortable you are with awkward silences.
We don't have much opportunity for awkward silence these days, much less awkward silence with ourselves. No podcasts, no music, no TV, just silence and our never-ending thoughts.
If that idea terrifies you then the alternative would be not waiting. You can not wait by doing simple things like:
Write “What next?” at the top of the page
Leave loads of bulletpoints down one side of the page and see what you feel compelled to list
Come up with ideas for if your biggest hurdle or barrier was removed, so what would you do with £100m or if you had ten years to build your product
Use some great facilitation tools
There are some really great tools out there now to help structure and facilitate your thinking. When I retire I think I’d like to just create more of those for the rest of my days.
Tools
One that most people in the world of startups and entrepreneurship will be aware of is the Business Model Canvas. Since 2008 this tool has become ubiquitous in the world of startup accelerators, incubators, hackathons, and founders’ workshops worldwide.
It really is an awesome tool, and there’s a reason why it has been so successful at establishing itself in the hearts and minds of so many people. In nine boxes you can map out a significant proportion of your business model and the resources and assets you have to achieve your goals.
I’m not going to go over the canvas here, but let me know if you’d be interested in a post like that.
The success of the Business Model Canvas is that it has replaced a traditional business plan for many early stage advisors. It captures more about the broader assumptions and beliefs which recognising the assets in play and where you think the business will succeed and fail.
It also introduces the very idea of a business model as opposed to a business plan. This is vital for an early-stage business which needs to stay agile. Traditional business plans cause you to create the illusion that you have all of the answers on day one, Business Model Canvas lets you show all the avenues to explore.
But there are countless other canvases now in play, and Strategyzer - the home to the Business Model Canvas - has plenty to browse and download.
Beyond these, there are a couple of others I’d like to draw attention to.
Triggers
I met the Triggers Cards team back in Barcelona in 2018 and fell in love with how simple and effective their tools were.
Triggers make (beautiful) decks of cards that are designed to prompt thinking. There are 14 decks which contain 60 Triggers Cards each with themes covering naming your project, brand strategy, social media strategy, and innovation.
The idea is that you turn over a card and answer the prompt as a group, then move on to the next.
When I’ve facilitated sessions with these cards I’ve found it useful to pick out the four or five that help to get closer to the specific objective of that group, but there’s so much depth and potential here that you can try different things every time.
Even if you only use them once a year, they look beautiful on your desk or bookshelf, so consider buying a pack just for that.
Untools
The Untools website is similarly simple, and powerful. Adam Amran has compiled a list of tools and frameworks to help thinking and problem solving.
You can find prompts, models, matrices, ladders, trees, and loops to get deeply into your current problem or decision making.
It’s a great website to keep bookmarked and check back in on regularly.
Callback
With all of these tools though, there’s a callback to an earlier lesson: be patient. The best Business Model Canvas workshops I’ve facilitated have been when everyone thinks they’ve exhausted one section and then you go back and try to double the list.
Don’t rush any of these things. Your deepest, darkest truths are afraid of the light. You have to coax them out over time, don’t expect the truth to emerge on the first attempt. Give things time and space, practice frequently, and try to spot patterns and clues.
Notepads for the Dog, Notepads for the Shower
This post has ended up getting a bit long, but I wanted to briefly mention one other point.
You need to spot when you come up with your best ideas.
I mentioned this in the post on how I got 50 articles written last year.
Some people come up with their best ideas when walking the dog (maybe down to the awkward silence I mentioned earlier), sometimes it’s when you’re in the shower (apparently to do with the frequency of the white noise in a shower and a survival technique when you have water running over your face), sometimes when you’re listening to an audiobook or podcast, or in a particularly engaging meeting.
You need to make enough quiet time to let the thoughts come into your mind.
Find a way to capture these thoughts when they briefly appear. Siri has been a useful tool for me when driving, taking notes halfway through a show, or immediately after a call.
It’s an unfair advantage in a world where everyone is hooked on constant stimulation.
If you can get your thoughts and ideas to progress, you can gain a bit of inner peace but also let that curiosity take you to interesting places. Let me know if I missed a tool or technique you use!
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