Richard Maun

Tag: thinking

  • Is It Ok To Think At Work?

    Where do you keep your brain at work?
    Where do you keep your brain at work?

    Last week there was a great reaction to ‘Unconditional Strokes’, which are essential to happy working lives (and happy home lives). So, this week I was going to write about Conditional Strokes, which are for doing or thinking, and then I thought: most people at work get recognised for what they do, but how many get praised for thinking?

    None, is usually the answer to that question. And yet people are often hired for performing well in tests that measure how well they can think. Amazing isn’t it that we specifically test for cognitive ability during recruitment and then ignore it during daily life. Hands up if you get scored for thinking skills on your annual appraisal?

    In many organisations the managers ‘think’ and the juniors ‘do’ and then when business suffers in the recession and juniors are asked to work smarter… they’re not able to respond.

    So if it’s Not-Ok to think in your organisation then you’ll probably suffer more as the recession bites harder.

    If you want your business to do well and you want employees to be happy then forget complex models and keep it simple.

    Just give people positive encouragement and constructive feedback for all the ideas they have (even if you don’t like them, or they need refining). An organisation needs all its brains to survive and Conditional Strokes for thinking are the lifeblood of success.

    Thinking is essential.

    What does your boss think?

  • Crow Does… Thinking Styles

    Crow says 'Hello to you'...he's a friendly sort of bird...
    Crow says: 'Hello – I'm a bird!'

    Hello, I’m Crow and sometimes I turn up at Richard’s workshops, which is fun for me and gets some interesting reactions from people. I like to help humans develop their presentation skills, or challenge some of their thinking styles and if I squawk, well that’s just me being friendly, as I’m a happy sort of bird. Richard is taking a break for three weeks and has asked me to stand in and say something interesting. He claims that he’s in the garden ‘thinking great thoughts’, but personally I think he’s just asleep. Oh well, anyway, here goes my blog…

    As a clever bird I like to think that I can do thinking and there’s three thinking styles I’ve learned to think about:

    1) Canyon Thinking. This happens when another crow (not me obviously) thinks about every little aspect of a problem and spends so much time on the details they lose sight of the problem! You could say that, like a narrow canyon, their thinking is one inch wide and one mile deep! Ha ha! (What’s an inch by the way? Crows never got the hand of basic measurement systems).

    2) Coyote Thinking. Some crows rush about doing the first thing that comes into their heads, without thinking through the consequences. A bit like Wile E. Coyote. Honestly, if you want something doing properly, get a crow to sort it, but not one of those silly impetuous ones.

    3) Broad Thinking. Ah, I’m good at this. This is when I take time to think through and round and over a problem. Sometimes I sketch out the issues with my beak, talk to other crows and generally eye up the problem from all sides. Richard says he does this too, but you know, I’m not always convinced he does. But then he is human! Not everyone is as good as crows!

    How was that? Hope you liked it. More Crow stuff next week. I might do a bit about ‘why pigeons are so stupid’. I could go on for hours….but do you know how hard it is to type with a beak?