Today we look at more mindset ideas and frameworks in soft skills — 360-Degree thinking.
For those short on time
360-Degree thinking is an approach to problem-solving with intentional, holistic reflection and thinking to create more multi-dimensional insights.
In other words, it is an intentionality tool for decision making and gaining insights.
You look at the present status and insight that you can gain, and ultimately, what solutions you see. This includes your goals, necessary steps, what their cost will be, who needs to be included to reach it, how you prioritise it, the challenges, cost, and consequences (as in a SWOT analysis). You combine this with your past experiences and intuitive foresight to create one deliberate, intentional analysis and decision.
It does not sound spectacular, however, a vast majority of decisions we take on the fly, almost intuitively. Which leads to many unfortunate and rash decisions we take. A decision is usually based on three things (not counting in outside influence and recommendations)
Your past knowledge and experience called hindsight
Your foresight of what you expect to be the outcome.
Your insights you can gain from a probelm
Hindsight
Looking back means to examine what happened in the past. Imagine having a diary that you read through and try to understand what led to the outcome. What were the circumstances, and what influence led me to make such a decision? You want to learn from your mistakes, from failures but even more, from your successes. Successes are overlooked; we take them for granted in decision-making. If we make a mistake, we ought to analyse it. I find this odd.
In Social Media marketing, you would only focus on the data that brought you the most traffic and clicks. You focus on the things that worked well. Then build on that. Decision-making habits should be the same: we did that, and it worked well in these conditions. Let’s repeat and improve on this. Thus, a journal could be your tool to go for this to create the insights you need.
Introspection is one of the more fundamental things you should do as a leading figure. You stay critical and learn from your past mistakes when you have time.
Admittedly, I have a hard time keeping up with journals. I never did them consistently enough over time. I had a myriad of single pages scattered in my phone where I did type in a few impulses and then forgot again.
If you say you don't have time for such introspection, journaling etc, like I do, take a minute a day.
What works for me is the daily one-minute standup, the personal moment of reflection.
Ask yourself: What worked well yesterday?
What did not?
What did I learn from this?
What one thing will I do differently today?
A habit could be to foster a more deep reflection to the end of the month, maybe 5 minutes. This goes well with seeing MRR and traction and planning the month. The quarterly aligning would then be the more broader objectives and goals, and then you have the annual retrospection - seeing if your mission and values are still in check and still bring you where you want to go.
My yearly review happens around summertime, usually when I take some time off from everything, that can take 5-10 minutes, or hours. With the evenings being warm and lengthy, I take some time to think and look back, usually sitting outside with my pad and taking notes for a minute. This periodic check in helps me stay in line and on track about where I want to go long term.
I ask myself questions such as:
What could I have done differently?
Where did I make assumptions?
How could I improve XX to move forward?
What should I adapt?
Where am I on my path?
Am I still on track?
Do I have to adapt my goals?
Where are my mental models not as good anymore as they once were?
Where are my assumptions out of date?
Looking back when you have the time allows you to find the ‘aha’ moments in your past behaviour. You seek the experience and understanding that you need to react when you have to lead in times of chaos. In times of chaos, speed matters. You will have to decide almost intuitively. People are high strung and emotional, and you will need to change course fast, redirect entire teams if required, and do all this while communicating clearly. This is change and crisis management. I once said to a client that liked boats:
You need to learn how to sail when the wind is calm before going to the open sea and embracing storms.
Foresight
The past is the learning book, but it is not the standard fo future decisions.
That’s where foresight comes into play. Foresight means to predict future scenarios, thinking about hypothetical outcomes based on the patterns and data you currently have available. If you have future events, you use forward-looking statements to state expectations or possibilities.
Particularly in business, the term is used more frequently. Think about a new law or legislation coming into play in your field of work. You would make assumptions about how it influences business, which parts would need change or a pivot to comply with the new regulations. Or a new feature being released on a platform you use.
Investopedia says concisely:
‘All of these claims and many more declarations in forward-looking statements might not come to pass, but they are valuable in offering a window into how management is viewing the business environment, the company’s situation within this environment, and its goals for future growth and change.’
To find and understand these patterns, you need insight into the matter and the surrounding factors.
Insight
Insight follows from hindsight and foresight.
Developing insights is hard, especially if you are in a fast-paced environment and have a lot of information available or pouring in on you.
Insight means analysing and understanding the present and, using hindsight and foresight, display experience-based critical thinking.
Think about the mentor that shared an insight that was way beyond your understanding of the situation, like, as if they saw a larger picture. And suddenly and way later you realise what they meant and the consequences.
You get insight by analysing the cause and effects of events, behaviour, statistics and circumstances. The best and wishful outcome would be to find an exact reason for a consequence, which usually is almost impossible. However, you build on experience and gaining insight, you can become creative, start innovating on the understanding.
Interpreting data and using it to initiate change is, to a large degree, intuitive and subjective. The world is not a chess AI that can calculate the next best move within that closed ecosystem of finite possibilities in a chessboard. Everyone that ever predicted the future took merely guesses, more or less educated ones.
Take the economic foresight for 2020 that were made in 2018 and 2019, for example. Did anyone predict the covid influence? No. It was impossible. A single outside influence disrupted what every so-called expert in the field said.
As a leader, you still have to decide on your present and past data to create foresight and embrace the fact that you might need to pivot when chaos arises.
360-degree thinking is an approach to intentionally reflecting and thinking; it is a practical mindset-based skill you will pick up along the way. The idea is to find deep insights into problems and situations. It is a self training to awareness to see
Deeper inside yourself : inward
Bigger systems: outward
Farther across time: Look forward, look back
The more common 360 degree framework does not specifically add awareness about diverse perspectives, which I would add as well. Diverse perspectives means: Look through other lenses. We will discuss that another time, today we focus on the basic 360 framework idea.
Cheers
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