Breakfast With Einstein.

I asked him what the is the equation for avoiding stupidity in business. He grabbed a chalk and walked to the wall. "Ah the theory of everything! Damn it!" He seemed animated. "Vell we need to use logic and quantum physics. It is zimply complex. You von't understand eet. Even I don't quite get it yet."

He scribbled madly as I tried to decipher the mans obsession with calculus and his disdain for meusli. He didn't stop for 35 minutes. I had 6 coffees - he was a blur with all that chalk and mumbling. He said - "The trouble eez we cannot accurately factor for all zis change at present."

And then suddenly there was this 'think' of beauty on the wall. The great man was done. He left muttering something about a black whole. I was trying to photograph the man grappling with the elevator in my apartment.

Improving your chances in business probably means change right? Everyone is searching for the right answer. Getting this right is tough. Right? And everyone around has their view and those are all different so it makes your head hurt! What are you going to do? 

Who are you going to trust? Three words of advice - 

Neutrality. Co-Creation. Rigor.

Now I would expect people to say WTF! What does that mean? Bullshit and jargon? I have never been able to find the right words for this so if it is bullshit then 'whatever'. If you care about how that all adds up to a tin of beans then read on.

Neutrality. In my head 'neutrality' is all about having no dog in the fight. How can we discuss anything about anything complex like transformation or strategy with a fixed opinion or a preset agenda! Being rigorously impartial is a great place to be! 

Co-Creation. And co-creation means working through stuff together. Emerging with fresh thoughts as a team. Surfacing insights as a collective. Sharing and then owning the outcomes. This is true alignment. And that adds up to Goal Congruency. 

Rigor. Rigor means putting the work in. Risk is not a bad thing - in fact it's an essential ingredient. But being lazy about the smart choices open to you by just not thinking it all through is unacceptable. Getting to a rigorous decision is imperative – we call this Decision Quality. Doh!

Thanks Albert – I hope you enjoyed breakfast.

Avoiding Stupidity. The Equation Principles:

1. Rigorous Impartiality. Having no vested interest in the outcome is a powerful place from which to ask the right questions. It means being interested in the correct solution to the puzzle. + 

2. Goal Congruency. Alignment on the vision, mission and strategy is essential. Shared and coherent definitions on everything is essential for a high performance strategy. Over.

3. Decision Quality. Making quality decisions means to reduce risk in the right outcome by knowing that all the data is as good as it can be and the correct choices are being made. =

4. The Right Answer. Every enterprise wants success. Whether its an overall strategy or vision, business plan or transformed business - having the correct, least risk strategy and plan is the challenge.

So, armed with a clear, agreed and compelling 'exam question' teams can 'work' this equation until the answers emerge logically through the right frameworks. http://www.grouppartnerswiki.net/index.php?title=4D

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The Hand Obsessed.

I can't read your writing - I must kill you.

Remarkable to think that the quality of one's handwriting has so much to do with strategic progress and business performance. And then again quite understandable. If someone stood in front of you for 3 days and took down your thoughts on a wall like your doctor wrote his prescriptions, or a mad professor who would assault your brain in a chalkboard scrawl - what would you think? Could you think? Would it aid your development of ideas - your ability to process and be more creative?

Would it speed your recovery if you couldn't refer back to the work done a couple of hours earlier? Well maybe. Less than ideal though.  Indeed I have noticed that if the letters and spaces are not ideal - the idea is not as believable. Not honored. If I am slightly out with the spaces around the words and the boxes I put around them, again the point has less gravity, not so much meaning or purpose. I can feel the lack of power conveyed.

I've observed a strong correlation between quality thinking and precise handwriting.

I've known this for a while but it's really become a bit of a major study for me. I'm gonna do courses on it!

So here's an illustration of why good handwriting and clear thinking matters and are directly related.

Picture the scene -

 15 or 20 executives trying to solve a complex problem in a collaborative way. At least starting that incredible journey - to land on a single page with a vision, a strategy and a plan to go execute. Oh and attempt to do that in the 2 or 3 days together.

I'm working with a team - 'writing' the ideas we are discussing into the framework as we go. I have countless options. Write verbatim - a sentence that comes close, shorten the idea more smartly into a similar yet crisp idea. Capture the rough essence of it with the intention of cleaning it up later. 

None of the above comes close to what really needs to happen to avoid lazy generalisms, semantic bingo and certain death. (To me or the strategy).

In each day's creative thinking (for 15/20 executives) there are typically between 400 to 500 'expressions of note' - That is to say the number of correct answers distilled from the thousands of parts of the key conversations. Each valid one makes it to the framework. In each day there are 4/5 deep delves into aspects of the problem being worked. That adds up to 1500 'expressions of note' over 3 days. Each one deeply meaningful and needing clear definition.

So over the course of a program of work - leaving any doubt or disagreement of the word/phrase – then disaster is likely to strike. A desperate unravelling can occur. Answers need crafting within the context of the problem being solved.  

I have to translate the idea perfectly into the correct and agreed phrase and write the words in a sharp, legible and highly engineered handwritten form if i'm to survive . The writing must be legible from 30 feet and be as enjoyable to read and as perfectly formed as is humanly possible. And then some.

Anyway food for thought – drawing conclusions!

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