Tim Hurson
Speaker, writer, and creativity theorist living in Toronto, Canada.
Planning can be quite an eye-opener. It’s where you see if you have enough rubber to meet the road.
If things weren't messy, or getting messy, there would be no discontent, and you wouldn't need productive thinking in the first place.
In my experience one of the most common causes for programs, products, and change initiatives that don't work is that the wrong question has been asked.
You can't mow the lawn with a chainsaw.
We think the more detailed and exhaustive our plans, the more likely the future will actually mirror our vision. But it rarely even comes close.
More often than not, people who "know" are also people who "no".
If you let it, your mind will celebrate new stimuli by automatically making dozens of unexpected connections for you. If you pay attention to them, you may discover the answer you've been looking for.
Sometimes it's just not practical to go through the effort of creating a new solution when an existing solution will do the job almost as well.
Giving ourselves permission to imagine allows us to access a huge resource of cognitive capacity that we often ignore.
The only dumb idea is, quite literally, the one that is unspoken.
But as important as it is to see what's going on, it's unlikely that merely understanding the situation will do much to improve it. If you're interested in change, you need to develop a sense of possibility.
Preliminary ideas are often weak and impure, and need to be driven through a forge in order to become powerful, workable solutions.
Often the true causes of our discomfort are so integral to our environment that we fail to recognize them.
No matter how dysfunctional the present, no matter how sensible the reasons for change, most people and organizations would rather wring out the old than ring in the new.
In the heat of the moment, it can be all too easy to generate solutions that take on a life of their own, without reference to the core values of the people developing them or those expected to implement them.
We tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term.
One of the major barriers to productive thinking is the almost compulsive drive in most business organizations to be right.
You can't outperform your self-image.
As in any discipline, to become good you need first to learn the rules. To become great, you need to break them.
Unless a potential future incorporates a powerful emotional pull, it will have great difficulty overcoming the gravitational pull of the past.