THE LONG VIEW (OR) BIG PICTURE THINKING – CHAPTER 02

***Continued from Chapter 01 (Covered previously: What Is Big Picture Thinking, Importance Of Big Picture Thinking, Detail Oriented Or A Big Picture Thinker- The Difference)

Link to Chapter 01:

THE LONG VIEW (OR) BIG PICTURE THINKING – CHAPTER 01

Identifying the Different Approaches – Approach Indicators

No matter which field we belong to – an aspiring entrepreneur, someone who’s putting together a dream team, or polishing our leadership skills, big picture thinking can help open up, innovative and unexpected creative paths, ideas and solutions.

Detail-Oriented Approach Indicators

• We prefer tweaking an existing plan than creating one from scratch
• We think over issues in such great detail that we sometimes miss the bigger picture
• We end up putting down or highlighting almost all notes
• We work towards high-quality work in most areas of our life and struggle with perfectionist tendencies
• We’re organized and/or like routine

Big Picture Approach Indicators

• We can easily spot patterns in problems
• We have a low tolerance for busywork, tedious errands, and routine
• We are good at figuring out an overview of strategies to get something done
• We get bored when we have to deal with the tiny details of a project
• People view us as incredibly creative and we like to come up with original ideas
• We don’t obsess over little details and therefore, solve problems fairly quickly

The Balance: Big Picture & Detailed Orientation- Components in Business

Strategies Towards a Big Picture Focus

A) Identify habits that limit our big picture thinking ability:. . . Our natural preferences often prevent us from blue sky thinking. So, the first step: break bad habits. Here’s a 3-step framework:

B) See things from a different lens: . . . Diving into big picture questions helps us connect the dots from our actions/tasks to the big goal. In this book, The Magic of Thinking Big, David J. Schwartz calls this, “see what can be, not just what is.” A good starting point is to ask ourselves, ‘what am I trying to achieve?’ Some big picture questions may be:

C) Think big by looking up: . . . The super basic rundown is that whenever we are focusing on the big picture, look up. And look down when not seeing the big picture.

A nice example of chunking reasoning is to think of transport. We can start with a motor car. If We chunk down, We might go to wheel, then rim, then rubber, then tread and even road. If We chunk up, We might go to transport, then to travel, then to vacation, then to wellbeing, etc.”

D)  Use bulleted lists to think big: . . . This is a trick many of use on a regular basis – making a bulleted list of the big picture and then adding sub-bullets to each pillar step. We can then step back and look at what can be added or removed from the sub-bullet pointers to keep the needle moving forward.

So why did this work? Because bullet points give us the visuals on the big picture. It’s challenging to connect the dots when we can’t see them. It’s also tough to translate the big picture if we don’t have it in front of us. What’s more, bullet points are easy to access and revise anytime. This, in turn, provides clarity.

E) Start journaling / mind mapping: . . . When we put our internal prattle on paper, we can easily spot where we are flailing or how it can be shaped to fit the bigger picture. To begin with, note down the big picture, followed by the small details pestering us. The trick is to make sure that it represents not only the big picture, but that it represents the detail, or actionable elements as well. Then record our thoughts to see if they deviate from the big picture plan. 

F) Schedule in some thinking time: . . . Often, when we rush to make a decision, we end up feeling sorry about it. When this happens, it’s usually for one of three reasons:

If we find ourselves nodding yes to any or all of these points, pencil in some uninterrupted, thinking time to our schedule. This space is crucial to making better decisions that rely on the big picture. We will also be able to rate our priorities better – what matters in the big picture, how it contributes to the big picture and so on. This will help us to stop hustling so hard, and ditch the shiny object syndrome.

Self Reflection- The Key

If we pause and contemplate how we are doing, we can make small tweaks that help us stay consistently productive. Some pointers to reflect on may be:

When we are busy executing any tasks in our lives for far too long, it’s easy to forget the details or the big picture depending on the type of thinker we are. For instance, as a big picture thinker, we may be excited by how our old and new ideas are connecting and work on outlining them, forgetting that the ideas have to be structured by many crucial details to work in the long term. The details person on the other hand might be buried in unending to-do-lists, feeling secure in the routines only to be disrupted by an enormous transition they didn’t anticipate.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa

THE LAYERS OF ISOLATED WORKGROUPS

COVID-19 has forced companies the world over to enact — or create — remote working protocols. The likes of Box, Amazon, Airbnb, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have all told their employees some variation of “work from home”. But so too are more traditional organisations across fields such as real estate, accounting and local government. Zoom team-selfies, are slowly polluting Twitter and LinkedIn feeds.

But like most things worth doing, there are different levels of proficiency and sophistication to scale. Many newly-remote workers seem to conflate simply downloading Zoom, Slack, and having access to email with having this remote working thing sorted out.

But having a ball and a bat does not make you a Cricketer.

A Case – Automattic Company.

When it comes to swimming in the deep end of the remote working pool, few companies are doing it better than Automattic — the company behind WordPress, which powers 35% of all websites on the internet. Automattic has about 1,200 employees scattered across more than 75 countries, speaking 93 languages. It boasts a company valuation of US$3 billion and has made several significant acquisitions such as that of WooCommerce and blogging platform, Tumblr. The company does not have an office, with its employees collaborating almost exclusively online.

Automattic’s founder, Matt Mullenweg (hence the “double t” in the company’s name) recently appeared on a popular podcast to talk on what he calls the five levels of distributed teams (he prefers ‘distributed’ to ‘remote’ because the latter implies that there is still a central place of work). Encouragingly Mullenweg’s sentiments echo the fact that the tools are only as good as how you use them. In fact, abuse of tools can actually make us less productive.

The Five Levels of Distributed Teams

Level 1: Non-Deliberate Action

Nothing deliberate has been done by the company to support remote work, but employees can still keep the ball rolling somewhat if they are at home for a day. They have access to their smartphone, and email. Perhaps they dial in to a few meetings. But they will put off most things until they’re back in the office and will be a shadow of their office-bound selves.

Level 1 is where the overwhelming majority of organisations were prior to the COVID19 outbreak.

Level 2: Recreating the Office Online

This is where most organisations now reside — especially traditional ones. It is where your employees have access to videoconferencing software (eg. Zoom), instant messaging software (eg. Slack) and email, but instead of redesigning work to take advantage of the new medium, teams ultimately end up recreating online, how they work in the office.

This extends to many of the bad habits that permeate the modern office and suppress the ability of knowledge workers to actually think, with..:-

1. . . . . 10-person video-calls when two people would suffice.
2. . . . . 60+ interruptions a day — now via Slack and phone calls.
3. . . . . the sporadic checking of and responding to email more than 70 times a day throughout the day.
4. . . . . hyper-responsiveness that is expected of all employees, leaving them wired to desktop.

Mullenweg equates lack of redesigning work around the medium. A similar example was with the radio drama of the 1930s, which was essentially the acting out of plays over the airwaves. Adapting the content to the radio medium was not fully considered or appreciated at the time. At Level 2, people are still expected to be online from 9 to 5, and in some cases to be subject to what essentially amounts to spyware, with employers installing screen-logging software on their employee machines to ensure compliance.

Level 3: Adapting to the medium

At level 3, organizations start to adapt to and take advantage of the medium. Mullenweg points to shared documents (such as a Google Doc), that is visible to all and updated in real-time during a discussion, so that there is a shared understanding of what is discussed and decided, eliminating the risk of lost in translation errors and time wasted thereafter.

It’s at this stage that companies start to invest in better equipment for their employees as well, such as lighting for video-calls and background noise-canceling microphones. Effective written communication becomes critical the more companies embrace remote work. With an aversion to ‘jumping on calls’ at a whim, and a preference for asynchronous communication (more on that later), most of Automattic’s communications is text-based, and so accurate and timely articulation becomes key. In fact, Mullenweg says that most of the company’s hiring is performed via text as opposed to candidate phone or vide calls.

When it comes to meetings:

1. Only hold a meeting if it is absolutely necessary and the same outcomes cannot be reached via a quick ad-hoc conversation, phone call, email, text or instant message.
2. Set the meeting to 15 minutes by default, and only make it longer if absolutely necessary (the shorter the meeting, the more succinct you will have to be, and the less time there will be for pointless small talk and rambling).
3. Set a specific agenda and desired outcome going into the meeting.
4. Invite only ‘must have’ people (unless this is a big Type-1 decision, two people should usually do it with three on the rare occasion).
5. Agree on next steps, allocate responsible person(s) and set due dates (this is especially important to avoid boomerang meetings).
6. Never, ever, use a meeting simply to communicate information — that’s what email or IM is for. Many are indeed learning that all those meetings could have in fact been emails.

Level 4: Asynchronous Communication

‘I’ll get to it when it suits me.’ This is the nature of asynchronous communication. The reality is that most things do not require an immediate response. For most things, a one-way email or instant message should do the job, with the recipient responding when it suits them. If something really is urgent, then the mode of communication should reflect that. Pick up the phone, or tap that person on the shoulder, but only if it is truly urgent.

Aside from the obvious and massive benefit of giving knowledge workers time to think, create and get into the flow state (a psychological state whereby we are up to five times more productive according to McKinsey), but asynchronous communication predisposes people to making better decisions. If you want to cut emotion out of the equation, increase your response time. Giving people time to think between question and response, rather than fall victim to blurting out the first thing that comes to mind in a meeting or when tapped on the shoulders, delivers a compound benefit to the organization over time.

In order to avoid tennis games and duplication of effort, ensure that asynchronous messages:

1. provide sufficient background detail, where necessary provide clear action item(s) and outcome(s) required.
2. provide a due date
3. provide a path of recourse if the recipient is unable to meet your requirements.

For example:

“Hey Sunil. Attached is the incorporation document for our new spin-off company. Please sign the document where requested and send it back to me by 4 pm this Friday. If you have any concerns, give me a call on 555 1983.”

Globally distributed teams, who work asynchronously, and master ‘passing the baton’, can get three times more done than a local team relying on everybody to be in an office between 9am and 5pm.

Awaken the Night Owls

Science suggests that our preferred sleeping patterns — our chronotypes — are programmed at birth. People are either night owls or early birds. Several studies have found that about 30 to 40 per cent of the population are night owls, which means that the modern 9-to-5 workday is sabotaging the creative and intellectual efforts of almost half the workforce. Studies show that while early risers are more alert in the morning, night owls show stronger focus and longer attention spans 10 hours after waking than their early-bird compatriots.

Level 5: ‘Nirvana’

This is where your distributed team works better than any in-person team ever could. Mullenweg equates this level with having more emphasis on ‘environment design’, insofar as the organization’s culture, and the physical environment people work in is concerned.

The disadvantages:

Three big disadvantages or concerns that face newly remote teams, and how to counter them, can be found below:

1. Team bonding and building
   1. Instead of telling their employees to be at the office 11 months a year, and have 4 weeks off, the script gets flipped. Employees have 11 months of remote work a year and have to make time to travel for up to 4 weeks a year for team bonding and building events.
      1. To counter this, organizations can make use of custom-built apps which keep track of who has met who, and then assign seats, say at a dinner party, so that people sit with people they’ve not yet met before.
2. Osmotic and office communication
   1. With everybody working online, you miss out on watering hole conversations, overhearing other people say something that you can help with, or just having a general awareness of your team’s activities by virtue of being within earshot of discussions.
      1. To counter this, some organizations use an internal blog, and a place where an incredible amount of conversation and activity is chronicled and captured.
3. Security
   1. Mullenweg points to endpoint security —computer networks that are remotely bridged to client devices — and used for BYOD such as laptops and smartphones.
   1. The alternative — being inside the office wall, as Mullenweg says —essentially becomes a single point of failure, and compromises depth in defense.
   1. What we should be doing instead is rather than over-emphasizing just access control, we need to be protecting against malicious behaviors. With over 70% of IT hacks using social engineering to get inside, he has a point.

***Concept Courtesy – http://www.automattic.com

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa.

MULTITASKING VS CONTINUOUS PARTIAL ATTENTION

The Story So Far (Background):

In the second half of the last century, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) influenced all social structures so much deeply that the impact has created a gap in between the lifestyles of generations and their view of life. Thus, two groups occurred: the digital natives growing with technology and the digital immigrants struggling to keep up with this technology.

In this techno-culture, the presence of the physical and digital world can overlap each other and creates a “hybrid space”, where one no longer needs to go out of the physical space to get in touch with digital environments. The hybrid space is where the boundaries are blurred and where it is hard for people to determine the distinction between physical and virtual spaces.  Digital natives are constantly connected and prefer to progress by randomly jumping from one place to another in modules rather than linear progression. The most prominent behavioural differences are:

Multitasking

It is now very common for people who are preparing their projects on the computer and who, at the same time, go on checking their e-mails and instant messages and chatting on facebook and concurrently join in conservation with friends next to them. For this reason, the concept of multitasking allows fulfilling two or more tasks simultaneously such as making a phone call or checking e-mails while doing homework at the same time. In multitasking, it is important not only the ability to take the control and to focus one’s attention, but also the need for what to pay attention to and how much attention to pay is important.

It is driven by a conscious desire to be productive and efficient. Studies show that it is impossible to focus on more than one task. Therefore, multitasking often results in a high error rate.

Continuous Partial Attention (CPA)

Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) has occupied the present-day agenda of cognitive psychology, communication and education. This concept is referred to as the situation in which the individual does not focus on one thing in reality while he or she is engaged in and follows everything. For instance, the individual watches email notifications, tries to talk to his or her children and chat at the same time. In this case, because the individual is under an interaction bombing, he/she can only focus on each of these interactions, partially.

CPA is an automatic process that enables people to simultaneously pay attention to several sources of information, whilst scanning for relevant information. It allows people to shift from superficially concentrating on a lot of information to focusing on highly relevant information during a short attention span.

Difference between Multitasking and Continuous Partial Attention

They’re sometimes used interchangeably, but the terms “multitasking” and “continuous partial attention” are vastly different in terms of learner behaviour—especially for eLearning purposes. Natural human behaviour dictates how your learners react to certain material, and in a world where time is a precious commodity, organizations must decide exactly how they want learners to experience and absorb information.

We all know the pro multitasker: She can do more than one thing at a time, and her goal is always efficiency and getting things done. Multitaskers are focused on checking off boxes and to do so, such as checking email while eating lunch or taking call notes while doing research. Multitaskers are driven by results and task completion, which can sometimes result in a lack of quality.

A contrast to that behaviour, CPA means paying attention to multiple things at once; not necessarily completing tasks. You’ve probably engaged in continuous partial attention when you walk on the treadmill while listening to a podcast, sent a text message while sitting in a movie theatre, or laid in bed and gone over the latest sales numbers with a late-night TV show in the background. CPA taps into human nature: We crave instant satisfaction and being able to pay attention to a couple of things at once and receive automatic feedback makes us feel good.

Implications in Business & Management:

The concept of multitasking implies the fulfilment of two or more tasks simultaneously.

However,CPA is a concept that expresses the state of being in communication and interaction with everything but truly staying focus on nothing. CPA is something similar to being aware of many things at the same time: drawing our attention to more urgent alerts like a new e-mail notification or the bell of a ringing phone. When CPA is preserved, the perceived control and the eigenvalue feelings are doomed to collapse at some point because our brain, in the long term, is not shaped to follow such observation.

Therefore, CPA is considered a focusing problem which has been caused by today’s information and communication technologies and which could influence almost every phase of daily lives of individuals. The radical transformation which occurred towards digital media as communication tools, has created a profound impact on the lifestyles of individuals. The generation, which adheres strictly to the digital world, has such facilities and advantages as multitasking; however, they face certain negative situations such as continuous partial attention.

CPA forms a high level of stress in the human brain. Therefore, individuals, addicted to the internet, have no time to react, focus on anything or decide thoughtfully; rather, they live in a permanent crisis and in anticipation of a new friend or of a new yet insincere message. This situation may become irresistible after a while. Therefore, digital natives should enhance their multitasking experiences instead of CPA regarding technology use by developing their self-control and self-regulation skills under the influence of cognitive overload.

Steps to Combat Continuous Partial Attention Syndrome:

Turn off notifications. 

Whether its the desktop computer at your workplace or the smartphone you always carry with you, for the love of god, turn off your notifications. That constant dinging, buzzing, and vibrating whenever something happens on Facebook or you get an email is contributing to your continuous partial attention disorder. Nothing’s so important that you should be continuously distracted all day long—have people call you if its an emergency.

Build a routine. 

Consistency breeds creativity. Having a set time and place for each task (and timeboxing your activities) let’s you off the hook when it comes to “always checking in.” When you know that you check and respond to emails between 4 P.M. and 5 P.M., you are not stressing about them all through the afternoon.

Practice galumphing. 

Galumphing is doing something ordinary (taking a walk) in a frivolous, playful way (skipping, whistling a tune, doing cartwheels). A little bit of whimsy in your day-to-day life can refocus your attention and promote awareness. After all, it’s hard to check your smartphone while you’re doing a cartwheel.

Appreciate the moment. 

The mundane, everyday moments of life are integral parts of your life too. Don’t fall into the trap of treasuring only the special, exalted times in your life—you will always be disappointed. Learning to be at peace with waiting is a special skill. Waiting offers an increasingly rare experience in our always-on world—a moment to pause and reflect.

Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) for eLearning:

The takeaway for understanding the difference between multitasking and CPA is this: organizations have to try harder to mold eLearning to their learners’ natural behaviors. Organizations have two choices: They can fight for that attention share with longer, more involved modules, or cater to waning attention spans by developing custom eLearning design and configuration that works in tandem with learner behavior.

The idea of page-turning eLearning might work for multitaskers, but ultimately results in lackluster information absorption. Instead of experiencing the material fully, it’s seen as just another item on the to-do list. Instead, integrating CPA delivery into existing modules in short, pithy, three-to-five minute bursts means learners can listen to an audio clip, play through a few levels on a gamified module, or watch a video, all while their attention is split. Relying less on eyes-on-the-screen eLearning means learners are more likely to tune in and, since they aren’t rushing to get through the module, actually absorb the information more effectively.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa