Tag Archives: Thinking

Having the Right Digital Mindset

04 Monday Dec 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Human, Digital, Innovation, Mindset, Productivity, Social Media

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Digital BrainDigital is used as a title to cover the current business and computing era. Being Digital is about having the right mindset. There is no magic course or exam that you can take that will pronounce you as being “Digital”. Its how you apply yourself against the changing landscape of business and technology.

There area many areas that could be included to help shape your Digital Mindset, however for me these fit into six main areas:

The Digital Era is enabling “A Growth Mindset in the Age of Abundance”.

Business

The business area covers the skills and thinking that are needed in your workplace and what you need to succeed. Businesses are being constantly challenged in the way that they operate today and look forward to tomorrow against what their customers demand, the market wants and competition are doing.

There may be a number of business processes that are in place that have been there for a while and are expensive to change constrained by a number of factors. This has meant that the processes haven’t grown. The changes that the digital era is bringing helps to remove these constraints and costs, allowing business to rethink how they achieve these processes. With the constraints being removed through innovation and advancements, with costs coming down, how can you change/transform these processes to meet the market challenges of today. What can you change/transform/automate?

Technology

The technology area covers existing, new and emerging technologies in your life. What you use in everyday life and what you could use or imagine that would help you complete tasks and achieve goals quickly and efficiently. Defining which technologies you should be using and learning will depend partly on what your job role is and the road maps and trends for the industry/sector. The aaS (as a Service)  economy is providing the ability to consume technology at a faster easier route with an abundance of choice of service to go with. The need for a growth mindset is key to navigating a direction and path through this and making decisions on which technologies best meet your needs. The key is to understand and keep up with the trends and technologies.

Social

The social area covers how you interact with the rest of the world, including your work and family life. Reading everything that is going on Social Media is literally “drinking from the fire hose” – so much happening you can get easily swamped with noise.  Building a Personal Knowledge Management System is one way of keeping in touch with what is happening and trending on topics that you are interested in on Social Media. Setting yourself a series of Social Media Rules will help define when and what you should put in the public domain and when not to.

Personal

The personal area covers yourself. Ensuring that your health is good and you are living life to the full or best you can helps. Eating well and keeping fit help keep the mind fresh and positive.

Understanding that change is happening everyday and we need to embrace this with a positive attitude and work through the ambiguity that it presents. A blog post by Richard Branson recently wraps this up nicely “You can’t control what happens to you but you can control how you react”

Fear of failure is another area that often lets us down and stops us from trying things, however we can learn from our mistakes so it is important to experiment and innovate. Doing small things and trying them – Theory of small bets – allows you to fail fast if things don’t work and keep any cost/consequences small. “Successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas — they discover them.” ~ Peter Sims

Application

The application area covers how you apply these mindset areas into your everyday life using method that are well documented such as Agile and Design Thinking. The key is choosing the right method for the situation you are in. Using aids to help you may be one way of doing this – Playing a game with innovation and thinking.

Learning

One of the biggest areas is learning. Keeping your skills up to date with the latest advancements in all the areas above. You should be looking to do 50 to 60 hours learning a year as a minimum (some professions require higher number of hours). Learning is easier with the internet through online courses, videos and podcasts allowing it to be undertaken at anytime. Re-enforcing your learning through explaining it to someone else or blogging about it is part of  The Nature and Cycle of CPD.

There are arguments for and against learning to code, however having an understanding of what is going on in the coding world helps with today’s advancing technology.

 

Further Reading

Twenty First Century Digital

Having the Right Digital Mindset: Business (Change, Agility and a Growth Mindset)

** (Blog post updated with links to latest series of blogs on Having the Right Digital Mindset)

 

 

Questioning the Question

21 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by in Innovation, Productivity

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A good technique I picked up on a while ago during a learning event which can help with thinking and innovation is the Questioning Technique. This is basically where you break down each part (word) of the question and challenge it by asking other questions around it. This helps in opening the orignal question up and looking at it through different lenses. You then ask broader and narrower questions.

During the learning event we were asked to question a certain question “In uncertain times how do you keep staff morale high?”.

Below is how I broke each word down.

IN

  • “In” what?
  • What boundaries make us “in”?
  • Is being “in” a limitation?
  • What situation makes us “out”?

UNCERTAIN

  • Why are we “uncertain”?
  • What are we “uncertain” about?
  • What is causing us to be “uncertain”?
  • How long will this last?
  • How much change is expected?
  • Is this period of “uncertain” a regular thing?

TIMES

  • Is this past, present or future times?
  • Is this a fixed amount of time?
  • How is this time being measured?
  • Are the times successive?
  • Is this fixed to a specific event in the economy?
  • Is this relating to a particular environment?
  • Who is defining the period of time?

HOW

  • How is morale today?
  • How has morale been over a period of time?
  • How is morale measured?
  • By what means should things change?
  • Why do things need to change?
  • Is there a quick fix or a long term solution?
  • Does the “how” attract costs?
  • What is the return for increasing morale?

DO

  • Instead of just doing “do” should question why first.  “Why” do things need to change?
  • In doing the “do” is there a plan needed?
  • Does “do” attract any costs?
  • Are you looking for new ideas or can you reuse something from somewhere else?
  • Who is going to “do”, individual, staff, company?

YOU

  • Does “you” relate to one person or everyone who is a member of staff?
  • Is it the responsibility of the person reading this question, just management or the company as a whole?
  • Is this directed at a specific individual?
  • Can one person be the catalyst to the changes needed or will it take a few or more to drive these through?
  • Could “how can we” make a better statement and open this to be more of an open question rather than a direct one?

KEEP

  • How long is a morale issue going to be kept for?
  • What period of time is “keep”?
  • Should this be “maintain” instead of “keep”?
  • Does keeping or maintaining attract any costs or overheads?
  • What happens if this is not kept up?

STAFF

  • Does this refer to a small section of “staff” or all “staff”?
  • Does this include any 3rd parties?
  • Who are the “staff”?
  • Is it “staff” who work in a particular environment?
  • Is it “staff” at a particular job level or pay grade?

MORALE

  • What is the level of “morale” at the moment?
  • How is this measured? Is this one person’s view of the morale at the moment or is there a wider view?
  • Is the view inside or outside of the company?
  • Is a person’s home life a factor in morale?
  • Is the effect on morale in the persons or companies ability to change (government, news, conflict, economy, wages, bonus, working environment, or the weather)?
  • Is morale being driven down by a competitor and their products?
  • Is changing morale at work going to have a knock on affect at home?
  • Is it home life that is affecting the persons morale?
  • Is there a work/life balance?
  • Is morale low due to high pressures and increased workload?
  • Will having an impact on morale change that persons or companies output or decrease it?
  • What is done at the moment to boost morale?

HIGH

  • How “high” is high?
  • Does Morale need to be lifted a little bit or a lot?
  • What is the measure of “high”?
  • Is there a scale of measurement in use or how will it be known when morale has reached the right level?
  • Is this one person’s perception of “high” or a multitude?
  • Is there an outside force driving the level of “high”?
  • Is there a cost of reaching this “high”?
  • What happens after you have reached the “high”?

Broader Questions

  • What are uncertain times?
  • What is the morale of the country at the moment?
  • How long will uncertain times last?
  • Is there an underlying cause?
  • If morale is higher does productivity become higher?
  • What are our competition doing?
  • What do the Staff think the morale level is?
  • Once morale is high how long will it last?
  • What other events will bring morale down?
  • Do our customers notice our morale levels?
  • How do other companies do it?

Narrower Questions

  • How can we understand the staffs perception of the level of morale?
  • How can we understand  our customers perception of the levels of morale?
  • If we gave staff a pay increase would this increase morale?
  • If we gave staff an additional holiday would this increase morale?

Conclusion

After going through this technique I would look to initially change the question from “In uncertain times how do you keep staff morale high?” to “How can we maintain positive staff morale?”. This focuses the thinking and creativity needed to suggest solutions.