Month: September 2020

Let’s look at some situations where you might need to listen carefully to make sense of what’s going on.

Your children or other family members might be distraught, wanting something or worrying about something.

You might be preparing for a sales meeting with a prospect you really want to land.

You may be dating someone from another culture and this are about to experience your first family festival.

You’re researching inner city gang culture and have arranged a meeting with a leading local gangster.

In some of these situations you’re not going to be able to bring along a notebook or a computer.

People will think you’re rude if you stop in the middle of festivities to take notes on what’s going on.

Or your gang member will have conditions on what you can record or say because they don’t trust you yet.

In these situations all you can take away is what you see and hear and remember in your head.

In many other situations, however, it is helpful and even expected for you to take notes and even co-create a record of what is going on.

For example, when my children were young and were really upset about something I found that trying to talk to them through the flood of tears didn’t really work.

Instead I would start drawing pictures of what had happened – something we called “drawing a story” and use that to talk through the situation.

But before we look at co-creation let’s look at how an ethnographer might go about entering and listening to what is going on.

In their book Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, by Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz and Linda L. Shaw, the authors describe the kinds of things you should be jotting down as soon as possible.

The model below tries to describe the approach they’re recommending.

The first thing you have to do is tune into your sense impressions, see what is there for what it is and rely on all your senses for information.

For example, in a business context you can get a feel for culture – you’ll face different approaches if you are in a boardroom filled with suits than if you’re in a plantroom talking to operators.

What’s around you has a huge impact on what is happening.

With your children, for example, before you react to what they do you should probably tune into how tired they are, how late in the day it is, whether it’s before or after school.

All these things will affect how resilient they are and how much or little it will take for them to get upset about something.

From a cultural context are you entering a quiet, sober affair or is it a noisy, joyful thing?

Now, it’s worth focusing this on situations where you are trying to work with someone else or a team of others – perhaps you’re trying to do business together or work on a strategy to solve an issue you are facing.

What you’re going to do is focus on events and happenings – the flux of every day life that the people in face in the situation that you’re jointly exploring.

For example, if you sell digital commerce solutions you want to explore what they’re doing and facing when it comes to online sales.

And that means talking through their experience, the events they remember and how they see things as happening.

Now, if you spend all your time talking you’ll miss something important – which is what they see as important.

What you want to do is get the people involved to pick out what they see as crucial.

For example, if you’re trying to sell your solution you may spend most of your time talking about technology and features and benefits.

But the important thing you’d have learned, if you had encouraged others to tell you what they saw as important, might have been that the people who control the budget are not at the table and you really need to persuade them that you can guarantee payback within a year.

And here’s the crux of the skill you need to have to listen – you have to let people tell you what they see as important but you might have to infer it from what you see them seeing, what they talk about and how they seem to feel about it.

The questions you ask and the connections you make will help you make sense of what’s going on – they will help you see what kind of meaning the people involved are making of their situation.

Now, why is this crucial.

It’s because no one cares what you think – they’re immersed in their own worlds thinking what they think.

If you want to work with them or understand them better you have to start with where they are, not where you are.

You have to truly see things from their point of view.

Now, when you are at a point where you are able to appreciate someone else’s world from their point of view – that is when you can add your own perspective to the picture.

For example, if your child is upset and you tell them what to do you’ll be astonished to find that you haven’t helped at all.

Instead, encourage them to talk to you – listen to them describe what’s in their minds and what’s upsetting them.

Listen without interrupting, except to ask questions and don’t deny their feelings by saying things like, “That’s not the case now, is it?”

You’ll find that the process of talking with you and seeing that you are really listening will help to calm them down and then eventually, when they’ve got everything off their chest, that’s when you might be in a position where you can add what you think, make suggestions that they could consider for how to move forward.

This process is no different when you’re dealing with adults – bar perhaps the crying and tantrums.

Although those can happen as well.

The point is that before people will be ready to listen to what you have to say they first need to know that you care.

And one way of caring is to give people the time to talk through things with you, to get it clear in their own heads how they think and feel about something.

If you listen to them then they will, eventually, be ready to listen to you.

Now, I’ve spent a lot of time so far in this series of posts talking in general terms about listening and how important it is.

For this to be useful I think we need to look at a number of specific cases and the kinds of issues you might face, and I’ll need to draw on my own experiences over time.

Let’s look at some of those situations over the next few posts.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

It’s pretty obvious that there are a lot of things out there in the world – and there are a lot of ways they can be.

What does that mean?

Take a lightbulb, for example.

From one point of view, a light in your house can be in one of two states – it’s on or off.

The day before yesterday, the bulb in my dining room was off – but that was because it was broken.

That’s a third state.

I replaced the bulb, but the new one was broken as well – for some reason I had carefully stored the last broken one in its box, presumably so I could order a new one but had forgotten to do that.

A fourth state.

I replaced the bulb, a halogen one with an LED – so a different type of bulb.

A fifth state.

Yesterday, the bulb didn’t work again, and that was because the power had gone off.

A sixth state.

In this example you see something that initially looks simple – something where you believe you can understand everything about it starting to increase in complexity, increase in the possible states it can take.

A state, really, is a particular situation, something that is possible.

And if a lightbulb can be in so many states just think about everything else in life – just how many variations are possible in the way things could be.

This is variety – and Ashby’s argument is that if you really want to be able to deal with something you have to be able to deal with its variety.

And that’s something your brain is designed to do, it will figure out how to survive when the lightbulb fails without going through an existential crisis.

Now, we just can’t deal with everything out there, every fact, every bit of information – we’d simply explode.

And so our brains are very good at doing to things – filtering out stuff that doesn’t seem to matter and focusing on stuff that does.

In the wording of systems thinking in this area you have attenuators and amplifiers.

I’m going to stay away from the jargon, actually, because it doesn’t really help apart from giving your new words for things you already know happen.

Essentially, in any given situation, you have to get your head around what are the main things.

Now that’s easy if your situation is a point – a dot, a single thing.

For example, if you’re playing basketball and you have to take a free throw – there’s nothing in that moment except you and the basket and how you take the shot.

Shortly after, things will explode in complexity, but at that moment the world stops and waits for you to get done.

But most situations are more like the shape in the picture above, all blobby and with bits poking out everywhere.

And if you want to do something that involves working with that kind of shape you can’t focus on just one bit, you need to understand it in all its messy complexity.

And how much of that you need to do depends on what you’re trying to do.

As the quote that starts this post explains you need to know enough to do what you want to do.

See…

I said some of this was obvious.

So, where do we go wrong?

Warren Buffett wrote that a management that always makes the numbers will at some point be tempted to make up the numbers.

What does that mean?

The way we monitor things these days is through numbers – the number of sales, the number of calories, the amount of billable time on a client.

That’s because we have learned what numbers do – we need profit to be positive, we need to take in fewer calories than we need a day to lose weight.

In Ashby’s mathematical treatment you look at this from the view of set theory.

There a set of things that can happen.

And for each of those things there’s a set of responses you can take.

The responses you take result in outcomes – that can be good or bad or near or far from a desired value.

For example, there’s a virus going around at the moment.

You could choose to go to a party or you could choose to stay at home.

In one case you could meet friends and have a great time and maybe catch the virus.

Or you could stay home, be safe from the virus and maybe get pushed out of your friends group because you aren’t engaging.

What happens will depend on what you do.

Unless you have a peek into the future.

Now, this is where things get a little hazy so you might want to consult original sources for exact definitions but here’s my take on this right now.

Doing something and then waiting to see what happens is a very good and scientific and experimental approach but it’s useless with people.

People don’t do things in the same way all the time, they act with purpose and don’t follow the rules of physics in the way that balls dropping from a height do.

With people you can try and make a call on what they will do in a situation.

In the virus example above, if you think your friends will stop talking to you because you don’t do stuff with them, then perhaps they aren’t very good friends – but maybe you need them because of the situation you’re in more than you fear getting ill.

Or, in an organization change project, you need to think about what different people will do to get your plan approved – how the board will think, how managers will react, what IT will say, what facilities will say.

If you want to come up with a plan that has a chance of working you’ll need to engage with the main players and understand how they will respond and then work out what will work in that situation.

Still seems obvious right?

But how many times do people start with a single message or get given a target and then set off hell-bent on achieving that target without really understanding the system they are operating in, the complexity of their environment?

Don’t you see that happening again and again?

Then again, you can’t understand everything, maybe you just need to focus on the next thing, but try and get ahead of the information.

Later on in Ashby’s paper on Requisite variety and its implications for the control of complex systems he puts aside the math and starts talking sense.

You’ve seen those bugs that are programmed to move around and when they bump into something move backwards and forwards until they bump their way away from the obstacle and head off.

In the real world if the obstacle is a tiger and you repeatedly bump into it your odds of surviving that encounter go down dramatically.

Which is why if you can see and hear the danger before you bump into it you have a chance to climb a tree or run away.

When it comes to your life and your business what this means is you need to look beyond what is immediately in front of you.

For example, you can look at your bathroom scales every day and see the weight changing, perhaps in the wrong direction.

But if you want to control that what you have to do is focus on what causes the change in weight, where you take in and burn energy rather than what the result is in weight.

Rather than focus on the thing, look at what causes the thing in the first place – use information to your advantage.

And here’s the point that I think I’m getting to after some time.

The way for you to get ahead of things is through the better use of information, through the better use of understanding.

If you have a behavior that is affecting your life you can try stopping that behavior or stop the things that give rise to the behavior.

Like snacking.

You could decide to have fewer snacks, and then you get stressed and the crisp packets get attacked.

Or you could avoid buying crisps at all and then you reach for fruit as a stress-reliever instead.

Or instead of doing a huge amount of work evaluating a possible software solution and then finding that IT will not approve it – you work with IT in the first place to find out what kinds of things they will approve and then decide the best way to respond.

Which might include doing things like outsourcing the task if you can’t get it done internally.

Here’s the takeaway.

Computers may be able to collect and process all the data out there but they still find it hard to deal with variety, to deal with patterns of complexity.

But your brain is designed to do just that.

Together you’re stronger.

So maybe it’s time for us to have a look at how we can use technology and computers to help us understand complex situations better.

Maybe that’s the thing for the next post.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

The first mistake we make is when we don’t really listen at all.

This often happens in meetings or lectures where someone is talking about something and we drift off, thinking about something else.

Some people aren’t subtle about it, doing their emails during the meeting itself – or you get very little engagement from the group.

It can happen in relationships or with your children, when you are busy doing something and they are trying to talk to you and you throw in the odd grunt hoping that will sound like you’re paying attention.

Now, sometimes it isn’t worth paying too much attention – something may not be relevant or impact what you do.

On the other hand, perhaps it does and you’ve not noticed because you haven’t put in the time to think through what it means.

For example, budget meetings can be boring and perhaps the fact that you’re going to miss your forecasts as a company is something you’re not too worried about – your focus is on making sure you do your job and your area of responsibility is well managed.

But, if your area isn’t making money then you might find that you’re seen as an area that needs dealing with – or getting rid of.

The big risk, then, is you don’t see what’s actually going on – the information is there but you’re not in the right position to see it.

The next kind of problem is when you do listen – but for your own reasons.

Think back to a sales call, perhaps when you were cold-called by someone who wanted to sell you something.

They have a goal and an agenda, probably wrapped up in a script.

This script tells them how to talk to you, how to go through a process that will get you to buy what they have to sell.

Now, the thing with this setup is that there is conflict everywhere anyway.

You probably didn’t want to take the call and start by being mildly irritated at being interrupted.

The salesperson has to try and build rapport with the initial questions, asking how you are, for example and then move onto getting time from you to make their pitch.

The thing both of you are really trying to do is work out quickly whether this conversation is worth continuing or not.

I think that if you get to a point where you know that this is something you’re never going to buy you might as well say that to the person calling and end the call.

A few times the person on the other end has gotten stroppy – irritable – because this means he (and it’s been only he’s) wasn’t given a chance to finish his pitch.

That makes it even less likely that he’ll actually make any sales.

Now, arguably, the world of cold calling has been changed entirely – you probably get calls only when you’ve opted into something.

Or if it’s a scam, which appear to be most calls these days.

Some time back I wrote about how a problem from one point of view is often a solution from another.

And selective listening is one of those.

From one point of view, if you don’t listen to the other person and instead just look for ways to advance your own agenda you’ll find it difficult to really connect with someone.

On the other hand, if you make it easy for them to figure out whether they want to learn more or not – if you put in the effort to make it easy for them to select you, then that can be a positive thing.

And that’s one of the reasons why you might shift from cold calling to investing in content marketing – attracting people who are looking for what you do, rather than trying to call and persuade people to listen to you.

Another problematic approach to listening is where you listen but interrupt to add your own views and judgment on what is going on.

I read a post recently where someone talked about doing a pitch where they were constantly interrupted and belittled.

There are several reasons why that could happen – perhaps one person feels like they need to show they have something to contribute during the meeting, or they’re just the kind of person who believes that confrontation is important, showing who’s the boss matters.

There is a tendency for many of us to jump to creating solutions before we fully understand the problem in the first place.

For example, you may have a technical solution to a particular problem.

The question is whether you have a solution to the problems faced by the company, because there will be more than one.

Your software may help with managing a particular data flow but how does it help the buyer deal with their manager, or talk to their board or help negotiate with the supplier.

But that’s out of scope you say – we just do this thing here.

But the thing you have to understand is that the thing you do fits within the thing they do – and unless all the issues they face are addressed your solution can’t really work to its full potential.

It’s important to practice slowing yourself down, stopping being critical too quickly without taking the time to understand why that thing you think is being done wrong may have been created in the first place.

All too often we approach conversations with a conflict based or confrontational mindset.

We need to change someone’s mind.

We have something to sell.

We have to make them want it.

In sales, especially, people are taught to build rapport, to effectively pretend that they want to know all about you and what you need.

The overt, the open reason for doing this is because they want to understand your business so they can provide you with the right answer.

The implicit, the hidden purpose is that they have something to sell and been given a script and targets and need you to buy from them.

Now, that’s all very well, but it’s a tiring and unfulfilling way to have to be.

A much better approach, in my view, is to take the time to listen and understand what someone really needs.

When you understand that you’ll be able to see how you can help.

And if you do this in the right way there’s a good chance that the person you’re talking to will see that as well.

They’ll see the value in the help you’re offering and can work out if they can afford to have you on their team.

The challenge here, then, is for you to understand everything they’re facing – but how do you go about doing that?

After all, that’s an infinite amount of information – where do you start and where do you stop?

We’ll look at that next.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Loops are things you will see all the time.

They have a variety of names but really it comes down to one thing after another in a circle.

The question is whether the circle is doing well or poorly for you.

For example, if you do something that compounds over time – put money in a savings account, follow a daily routine, go for a walk every day – then you’re probably going to end up better off, achieving more and healthier over time.

And the opposite is going to happen if you keep spending more than you earn, lounge on the sofa all day and chain smoke.

Now, studying loops can take on a fascination of its own, especially when you start looking at interacting loops.

The idea there is that some loops reinforce things while others balance them out, so you end up with this constant, dynamic interplay between things.

And if there is a delay in the process – something happens, you wait, and then something else happens you get oscillations, swings and lots of noise in what’s going on.

Being able to see a loop can take time – which is why you should never react to the first thing you see, but instead follow what happens next and what happens after that.

If you start to see where the connections are and where things go round and round then you’ll be more likely to figure out the point at which intervening is going to be most useful.

Another thing you will see often is choices and dilemmas – what road to take when you come to a fork.

You perhaps have few truly life changing situations like this – I can remember only a few anyway.

And it does help to have a way to think through the options and complexities and select the best path.

I did use an approach involving decision trees when I made a big choice – whether I should go and do an MBA or stay at work.

I went back to my files to find that decision tree and you can see it in the image below.

What’s interesting is that the actual monetary difference between doing and not doing it is very small in the analysis.

But the process of thinking it through helps you work out which road you really want – but with a clear view of the risks you are taking.

With dilemmas you have a different problem – when both roads lead to problematic outcomes.

In that case you have to take the least worst path and that does involve difficult decisions.

Another kind of situation you might face is feedback loops, where the output from one thing is fed back into the input of a previous thing.

You’ll often see this in how your manager works with you – when they ask you to rework something because it doesn’t work for them.

But you’ll also see it in your own work – when you do research, work on a paper or a presentation.

You’ll have a first pass and then refine your material based on what you think of the output.

That iterative, feedback led approach is crucial to getting a good piece of work done – no one ever gets it perfect the first time.

You have to build in time for feedback, for review, time to digest and consider and come back and change.

All too often we rush into things, try and get stuff out quickly.

I know I’m one for that – I like writing and creating and then I Want it off my desk,

Re-reading, revising, editing – all those are things that are much less interesting, that take up more energy and that I find hard to do.

But you have to find ways to help yourself do the things you find difficult to do too.

And that takes us to another pattern, one where we may have more than one way to do something and we have to figure out which one we’re going for.

Or, more importantly, when we’re going for one.

A good example here is the popular idea of a side hustle – where you have your job and you also have income generation on the side.

There are many examples of entrepreneurs who keep going with their main job while working on their own projects in their own time.

You might feel like you have to quit your job and devote yourself entirely to your idea but that’s a big risk.

You’re probably better off trying to get it off the ground while still bringing in an income rather than putting yourself in a that situation where you jump off a cliff and have to build your parachute on the way down.

If you can do both things then you can shift from one to the other when it’s the right time, when you have enough income coming in from your business so that you can give up your job.

That’s a case of balancing the risks you take and the rewards on offer.

When you’re exploring a situation or listening to someone you need to start looking out for these patterns.

Where are the loops, the reinforcing or destructive patterns of behavior?

What are the dilemmas – what’s stopping them from moving forward?

Where is the learning and feedback, what should they pay attention to so that they can improve what happens earlier?

And how can they balance and navigate between options?

You won’t really see these things unless you are listening carefully and completely – so it’s worth taking a look at when that doesn’t happen in the next post.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

A storage model of memory sees the brain like it’s a hard disk, a place where stuff is stored and later retrieved.

The way it’s stored is different, you have neurons and chemistry rather than magnets and circuits – but in essence you put stuff into memory and then access it later.

The kinds of things you put into this memory include facts, experiences and concepts.

In particular, it contains your word bank – all the words you know and can draw on when you talk to someone else.

The only thing with this model is that it leads you to believe that what goes in is what comes out – but is that really the case?

Another model of memory is one that sees what you remember and being modified and changed over time.

In the book, “Stumbling on happiness”, Daniel Gilbert talks about how there are many things we wouldn’t do again if we truly remembered them as they were.

Childbirth, for example, is hugely painful – but after a while what women remember is the joy of having their child – to the point where they consider going through the pain again.

People who go through a traumatic incident – losing a limb or bodily functions are no less happy than others after a period of time – their brain rewires itself to cope with the situation.

Now, this is something you can check for yourself.

How often do stories change over time – when incidents or events are told and retold and in the telling change their form?

Do you remember something more kindly over time or have you fanned the flames of indignation and still burn with anger over a perceived slight from years ago?

Now, given those two approaches to memory: storage and retrieval, and construction and reconstruction, what happens when we listen to someone?

The interesting thing there is as humans it seems that we need to talk it through to make sense of it at all.

If we aren’t allowed to speak we can’t actually think.

Now, many of us are probably guilty of this, especially with the people closest to us.

Do we give them time to talk or do we cut them off, jumping in with our own ideas?

The irony is that if you really want to get someone to understand something you probably need to lean back and ask questions that will help them discover it for themselves rather than telling them about it.

Asking and answering questions is the way we work out what we think about something.

For example, many business pitches and presentations are structured around “telling” – here’s everything about us in order.

A different approach to presenting, set out by Andrew Abela in his book on the extreme presentation method is about doing your presentation by asking the questions your audience has in their mind and then answering them as you go along.

You know it’s worked when your audience doesn’t keep questioning you when you stop but start discussing what you’ve said among themselves.

They start to put it in their own words.

That’s important – when they restate things, say it in their own words – that’s when they’re really starting to understand the ideas, when they begin to “get” it.

And you’re on your way to a sale.

Letting people talk is crucial – right now as you read these words, you aren’t reading polished, finished prose – my thoughts aren’t complete, coherent and structured.

Far from it.

I use writing as a way to think through these ideas for myself – I try and write in the way I would speak to someone and my choice of words and the way they come out is helping me understand this topic as I write.

I suppose in many cases this stuff is done in private and people don’t show you how they came to an idea – they just show you the finished product.

But if you want to work with someone else you have to recognise that they probably need some time to work through what they’re thinking and if you can help them do that you’re probably going to be selected to work with them later.

Clearly, what makes the difference is not what you say but how you ask questions and how they are answered.

Let’s look at that in more detail in the next post.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

p.s. The image above is shorthand, Teeline for the following

This is why I speak to them in parables: Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. – Matthew 13:13

One of the consequences of the pandemic has been that I had to spend time learning what is taught in primary schools and I came across the idea of graphemes and phonemes.

A phoneme, in case you don’t know, is a sound you make – what you say.

It’s sort of there in the root of the word – its about the phonic, the sonic element.

A grapheme, on the other hand, is a mark you make to represent that sound – graph as in draw.

So graphemes are literally representations of sounds using drawing.

Now, if you start to look at how writing has developed over time you might come across Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum.

To give you a flavor of the person, have a look at this talk, in which he tells you about the evolution of writing and says, “The shift from pictographic use to writing sounds was the only real giant leap man has ever made apart from the development of the Electric Guitar.”

Writing started with drawing – if you wanted to represent a bird you would just actually draw a simplified bird form.

The sort of thing you get with Egyptian hieroglyphics.

But there are lots of words that you can’t just draw, where there isn’t a physical equivalent – words like “word”, for example.

So you end up developing alphabets and if you look at their history you’ll see how the letter “A” has its roots and shape in an ox.

Look at an A upside down and you’ll see the horns and head – but rather than the “A” representing a literal ox, it starts to be used for the sound.

So, you first had pictographs which were useful for quantities and physical things and then you had the alphabet, which lets you capture all the words you can say.

This little digression is important, I think, because writing is really a form of drawing – and I think you can do something quite useful when you combine the power of the two approaches.

The first function of note taking for many people, then, is to capture the words people say – the sounds they make.

In many cases chronology is important, you capture notes in a linear fashion as the words come at you.

For example, think of what a police officer or a journalist does.

They have a pocket notebook and they ask questions and take down facts and direct quotes.

A police officer’s interest is in the timeline and the facts – what happened first, what happened next, what did you see, what evidence is available.

A reporter is interested in the facts, but is also looking for the story, which you will usually find in the feelings people have about the situation.

As a reporter, then, you will also take notes about the situation, the surroundings, the feel of things – the sort of details that add context and flavor and bring a touch of reality to your story.

With police officers and reporters your notebook is also a legal record, which means that you have to preserve those documents and show that they haven’t been tampered with.

And because you’re taking notes in a bound notebook they are necessarily linear and chronological, you write down things one after the other and the pages stay in place.

A different kind of linear notebook approach is taken by people who need to record thoughts and ideas rather than spoken words – the kind of work engineers and research scientists do.

They use laboratory notebooks, bound and numbered pages and again record things chronologically, with results and ideas and experiments.

A linear approach works when you have to do one thing at a time but there are several situations where you the restrictions of the bound notebook gets in the way.

If you’re a lawyer, counselor or business person, for example, you’re probably going to have several meetings where you’re taking notes.

You could have all that in a single notebook but you rarely ever see a lawyer using that approach.

If you picture a lawyer you’ll probably see them using a legal pad – and that’s simply because once you’ve made your notes on a particular case what you want to do is tear off the relevant pages and add them to the case file.

Using individual sheets of paper to take notes comes in useful when you have to maintain a filing system – when you’re building up notes on many subjects over time.

This approach is also useful when you’re collecting research in addition to recording spoken words and your own thoughts and ideas.

If you’re reading and making notes on what you come across then loose sheets help you organize that by topic later.

Now, most notes, whether linear or non-linear, are probably word based but what you can do to help improve understanding and retention is add pictographs to your graphemes – use the power of drawing and writing.

That’s what you do with sketchnotes – bringing in visual elements that capture concepts and things more effectively than words alone and that also help you emphasize or indicate relationships between the notes you take.

The transition from simply recording what is said, what you think or what you read to analyzing what you are putting down is an important one.

Sketchnotes are a first step to making that shift – as you move from a vertical arrangement of words on a page to arranging concepts in space, like in the image below.

This is the kind of thing I use in my own work which combines traditional note taking with sketches and an infinite sheet of digital paper to leverage the power of spatial note taking.

As someone who primarily works with organizations, where systemic approaches are important, this kind of note taking approach is more helpful when you’re trying to work out what’s possible and achievable in the situation you face with the resources you have rather than what’s the task, case or story.

That’s the difference between what a manager or entrepreneur does and what a professional typically has to do.

I think this post is long enough and really only covers the areas that aren’t circled in the picture at the start of the post – the elements of note-taking in the raw.

The other two elements are really about analysis and method – ways to help you think better once you’ve taken down your notes and I think we’ll look at those in the next post.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh