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Archive for month: July, 2019
Thinking at work isn’t dead – is it?
The smartest bloke I ever knew used to start his working day by putting his feet up on the desk. Is that still important?
I’d gone to work in his department from a demanding operational job and it was a shock to see all this apparent leisure happening. So I asked him what he was doing and got the predictable answer:
“Thinking!”
Just recently I’ve been coaching in a couple of organisations where the amount and quality of thinking left a lot to be desired!
Problems which could have been worked through seemed mystifying.
Rewarding opportunities, which a little bit of smart analysis would have highlighted, were lost in a frenetic chasing of the more obvious.
My smart boss was quite fierce about it:
“I recruited you to do the smart thinking too. So you’d better find your own way to make it happen.”
But it’s not just the business benefits that make good thinking so important. The future of work is going to be very different, just in the next few decades compared with today, driven by an exponential growth in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace. It might not be too strong to say that:
In the future, if you’re not thinking at work, you won’t be at work!
AI experts say that the human talents they believe machines and automation may not be able to replicate are primarily about:
- creativity
- collaborative activity
- abstract and systems thinking
- complex communication
- the ability to thrive in diverse environments.
All of those require at least a modicum of good quality thought.
If you’re a business owner or a leader in a larger organisation:
- How much good thinking are you doing yourself (whether you have your feet up on the desk or not)?
- How do you make sure that your teams are doing enough good thinking?
As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach. What kind of thinking is important in your work – and how do you make it happen?
You are amazing
When you get to really see people for who they are, their light and their dark, they are truly inspiring!
Maybe I’m just in a good mood at the moment (although it’s lasted quite a long time if that’s the case) but I’ve been finding lots of my coaching clients very inspirational just lately. And for a man who’s a natural cynic, that’s a nice place to be.
I love my work and one of the great gifts it brings is the opportunity to see people for who they really are. By which I mean to notice and understand the whole person (to the extent that you ever can). Their light and their dark together.
I frequently find myself thinking how amazing this person sitting in one of my client chairs actually is. Not because of what they are doing in their life and work – although lots of my clients do do amazing things. And not because they’re a ‘good’ person either.
For me it’s a kind of gut sensation. As we’re coaching together, if you’re lucky, you build up a picture of somebody: their light and dark, their strength and weakness, their kindness and cruelty, their aspirations and their fears.
Often in the coaching I get the chance to say what I’m seeing – we call this a ‘Recognition’, and it might go something like this:
“I see your commitment to this project you’re leading, even though you sometimes doubt your abilities and don’t know how it’ll work out. That’s courage, right there.”
And for every one of those Recognitions I’m able to say out loud, there are several times when a bit of my brain is lost in wonder at the sum of somebody’s parts.
I often think that mine is one of those jobs where you don’t really need to look too hard for inspiration. It comes and sits in one of my client chairs and is ready to reveal itself if I look and listen well enough.
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter
Yoda
As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach. What inspiration or other qualities do you see in people if you look?