INSIGHTS
Latest POSTS
Ideas to help you communicate with greater clarity wherever you work.
Thinking Tools #8 – How corporate templates can frustrate clarity
This week’s insight from Shane Parrish’s The Great Mental Models offers some useful ways to test our mental maps. In the chapter called ‘The Map is Not the Territory’, he talks about problems that the disconnect between reality and a map (or model) can bring and...
Thinking Tools #7 – How to engage self-interested stakeholders
This week’s insight from Shane Parrish’s The Great Mental Models is all about understanding the motivations of people. This is central to understanding our audience, and Shane offers three particularly useful considerations for us in that regard. He offers a side-bar...
Thinking Tools #6 – Why you need a latticework of models in your head
This week’s post leads me to talk about patterns, which we find to be an essential communication tool. Shane Parrish of The Great Mental Models quotes Charlie Munger in this regard. He discusses the importance of relying on a ‘latticework of theory’ rather...
Thinking Tool #5 – Avoiding Blind Spots
I loved my ‘fast fly’ through this book and am realizing how much more I am finding useful by going slowly and preparing these posts for you. Thank you for encouraging me to slow down! I am still in the introduction reading about the power and dangers associated with...
Thinking Tools #4 – Getting out of your own way
Given the positive feedback on this series so far, I have returned to the front of Great Mental Models so we can gain full value from this excellent book. In doing so I found a very useful set of ideas which relate directly to our need to communicate robust...
Thinking Tools #3 – Using inversions to identify gaps in our thinking
The first time I recall using the inversion strategy was during my interview with McKinsey.I remember a Senior Engagement Manager called Saimond putting me through my paces around a case and then posing a leading observation."So, you have given me some great demand...
BREAKTHROUGH THINKING STRATEGIES
