I am a huge fan of Daniel Pink. In fact, I think one of my first posts on this blog was about Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind.  Pink is a contributor for the London Telegraph.  He recently wrote an article entitled, “‘Can we fix it’ is the right question to ask.”

I’m sure you’ve seen or heard of Bob the Builder.  The show has been on television for the past eleven years and it reaches children in 240 territories and 45 different languages!  Pink uses Bob the Builder’s signature question, “Can we fix it,” to illustrate the difference between positivity and doubt.  According to Pink’s research: In a nifty set of experiments, three social scientists explored the differences between what they call “declarative” self-talk (I will fix it!) and “interrogative” self-talk (Can I fix it?). They began by presenting a group of participants with some anagrams to solve (for example, rearranging the letters in “sauce” to spell “cause”.) But before the participants tackled the problem, the researchers asked one half of them to take a minute to ask themselves whether they would complete the task – and the other half to tell themselves that they would complete the task.

The results?

The self-questioning group solved significantly more anagrams than the self-affirming group.

The researchers – Ibrahim Senay and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois, along with Kenji Noguchi of the University of Southern Mississippi – then enlisted a new group to try a variation with a twist of trickery: “We told participants that we were interested in people’s handwriting practices. With this pretense, participants were given a sheet of paper to write down 20 times one of the following word pairs: Will I, I will, I, or Will. Then they were asked to work on a series of 10 anagrams in the same way participants in Experiment One did.”

The outcome was the same. People “primed” with Will I solved nearly twice as many anagrams as people in the other three groups. In subsequent experiments, the basic pattern held. Those who approached a task with questioning self-talk did better than those who began with affirming self-talk.

“Setting goals and striving to achieve them assumes, by definition, that there is a discrepancy between where you are and want to be. When you doubt, you probably achieve the right mindset,” researcher Albarracin explained in an email to me.

“In addition, asking questions forces you to define if you really want something and probably think about what you want, even in the presence of obstacles.”

Pink concludes, “Questions open and declarations close. We need both, of course. But that initial tincture of honest doubt turns out to be more powerful than a bracing shot of certainty.”

How do you approach projects?  Do you give yourself a pep talk or do you ask questions and create space to come up with deeper solutions?

I am a huge fan of mind-mapping.  It’s an easy way to organize your ideas.  Here’s a great resource on how to get started (crayons required).

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I was having trouble getting started on this column, so I turned away from the keyboard for a while and started jotting down words on a legal pad. There was no order; I just wrote down the things I knew I wanted to include all over the paper. The goal: to start seeing patterns and connections that would help me organize this information.

I was trying this approach because I’ve been learning about mind-mapping and visual notetaking.

This method of capturing information looks a whole lot different than your old notes from high school history class. You can use a mind map to brainstorm, plan, study or take notes. Mind-mapping fans say it kick-starts creativity and understanding.

What is it?

To understand what mind-mapping is, let’s start with the work of Katharine Brooks, director of Liberal Arts Career Services at the University of Texas. Mind-mapping is an integral part of her work with students and her career guide “You Majored in What?: Mapping Your Path From Chaos to Career” (which I wrote about in this column last year). She’s also recently begun working with adult job-seekers (see the box on page D6 for information on an upcoming workshop).

Brooks encourages the students and adults she works with to do what she calls “Wise Wandering” maps, where they fill a piece of paper with significant experiences in their life, without trying to put those experiences in order. Once they’ve written everything down, only then do they start looking for connections.

“It opens you up to new ways of thinking or a new discovery that you might not otherwise have made,” she says. “Because it is nonlinear, you are not trying to force anything into a category.”

This does more to help expand possibilities than making a conventional list, she says. If you wrote down a linear list of significant experiences in your life, your tendency would be to categorize: This is what I did in high school, this is what I did in my first summer job, this is what I did in college. You might not see the connection, say, between your love for debate team in high school and the fact that presentations are your favorite part of your job now because the two experiences are from different parts of your life. Using the mind-map format frees the information from categories and helps you see connections you might have missed before.

“You see different patterns. It allows your mind to play with the information you already have, but in a different way,” Brooks says.

Another fan of the technique, Austin Kleon, agrees. The artist and writer is probably best known for his new book “Newspaper Blackout,” in which he creates poems by blacking out words in newspaper stories. You can see examples of his work at www.austinkleon.com/visual-note-taking/.

“It makes generating ideas and seeing patterns in ideas easier because I’m not limited to linear logic or order,” he said in an e-mail interview. “Sometimes the ideas I get when taking notes non-linearly come entirely by chance — I’ll just happen to write one idea next to the other, and by sheer dumb luck of that combination, I’ll get a new idea, or I’ll make a new connection.”

Mind mapping might also be a better fit for your way of thinking. Some people are natural list-makers; some aren’t. If you’re in the latter category and have trouble breaking down major projects, this could be a good alternative for getting a handle on them, Brooks says.

Let’s take planning a wedding as an example. To begin, put the wedding date in the center of the page, Brooks says. Then think of the key areas you’ll be making decisions about: what you’ll wear, the color theme, flowers, cake, parties …

“You just splash those all over the paper in no particular order,” Brooks says.

Doing this will jog your brain to think about other things, like going to the printer about invitations. Put those on the map, too. Don’t try to organize the information; just dump it all out on the page.

After you’ve emptied your brain, then start making the connections between items and making your game plan. “I love this notion of getting control from chaos,” Brooks says. “Because your brain is a little chaotic, particularly when you’re trying to plan a major event like a wedding.”

Tips

“First I just use a regular old sheet of 8 1/2-by-11 paper, then I turn it horizontally,” Kleon says. “This is really the key first step because by turning the paper horizontally, you’re already changing things up. Then, I take a pen and a box of crayons, and I start in the very middle of the page with the main subject. Then I simply move out from there, filling in the rest of the page with my ideas, as they come. I’ll use the crayons to organize the ideas by color.”

Incorporating artistic touches like color or pictures cut from magazines might make the technique more fun and useful for you, but you don’t have to use them.

“I hear that all the time: ‘I’m not an artist,’ ” Brooks says. A mind map can use nothing but words if that’s what you prefer.

“It’s all about how your mind works,” she says.

Kleon agrees.

“If you can write the alphabet, you have all the skills you need,” he says.

Your map doesn’t have to be neat, either.

“I sometimes think the messier the better,” Brooks says, “because then you have this amazing sense of accomplishment when you start to see the bigger picture in it and get it organized.”

The freedom to put stuff all over the page without any order can also be a little unnerving.

“It’s not uncommon for people to freeze a little bit when they first try to do it,” Brooks says. “They immediately start making a list.”

But if you keep going, you’ll usually find that the ideas start flowing, Brooks and Kleon both say.

“I like to say that a blank page is the most terrifying thing I can think of,” Kleon says. “So that first mark is everything. Go ahead and make that mark, and you’re off to the races, so to speak.

Tip of the hat to Amy Dolan of Lemon Lime Kids and Greg Carlson of Trinity International University- they both have taught me many of these principles and helped me prepare to be an effective meeting leader.

Principles of Effective Meetings
1.  Start with inviting the right people (not people who “should” be there, but people who absolutely need to be there because they will contribute.)
Choose the team based on what each person will bring to the meeting.  Let each person know why they have been invited before the meeting and when the meeting starts (in front of the rest of the team).  This exercise gives each person a sense of mission and a sweet spot to use their gifts and talents as the meeting progresses.
2.  Trust that by inviting the right people, the work will get done
When you invite the right people, you can be confident that the work will get done.  Choosing the right team for the meeting based on the meetings objectives is the absolute best way to prepare for the best meeting.
3.  Spend your time preparing to lead the meeting well
Think about transitions. Think through key questions that the team will ask.  If a script will help, write one.
4.  Set rules and some objectives
Here are some examples of rules I’ve set up for recent meetings:Think Big Picture, Stay on Topic, Please, One Conversation at a Time, Be Prepared or Prepare to Sing, No Caveats, Aim for the Fences, Defer Judgment.  Before I lead a meeting, I review the rules.
I also give the team a reason for meeting.  I feel like if I cannot come up with a compelling reason to meet, then the meeting is a waste of time.  Also, given the meeting objective I give people the option to attend the meeting.  If you cannot contribute to the objective, feel free to stay home.
5.  Follow up personally
It is really frustrating to spend an entire day away from other tasks and relationships, working on ideas, only to find out that your time and effort meant nothing.  The only way the team will know how much their work meant is if you tell them and give them action steps to take the project further down the road.

From the fog of past memories, I recall a televangelist show named the “Hour of Power.”  I do not recall what happened on the show, probably because I often changed the channel to something more like the “Hour of Cartoons” (which I was obsessed with as a child).  Recently my obsession has turned to the subject of productivity.

In my ministry context, I try very hard to limit meetings but they happen.  Many run long.  Some begin with great hopes for future production but end with faint glimmers (and those are often the meetings I’ve led).  So I took a hint from Scott Belsky of the Behance Network and put into practice the Hour of Power.

Belsky presents these guidelines:
Stop thinking big picture and zoom in on the particular factors that impact outcome on a daily basis.
Place an hour on your calendar every day to focus on issues that have an immediate impact and a measurable outcome.
You can read his entire article here

Here’s what I’ve done in my recent power hours:
1.    Listed the activity station ideas I’ve received from students in the past month, evaluated the list and purchased some of the items.
2.    Assigned individuals who have served one-time to a captain for follow-up.  In fact, I’m always looking for the best responsibilities I can offload to gifted leaders who serve on the team.  This has been one of the best uses of my hour.
3.    Calendar evaluation – I look at how I’ve spent blocks of time in the past week and how those measure up with how I should be spending my time.  Often I’ll get caught up in a project that keeps me at my desk and away from people.  I try hard to remedy those trends!
4.    Stack-sort – I’m always stacking things around my office.  I work through a stack, putting things in one of three places: Inbox, File, Trash.

Start integrating a power hour.  I do not think I have the capacity to incorporate it into my daily routine, but once a week has given me a real boost in productivity.

I’m a huge fan of the StrengthsFinders assessment.  When I took it a few years ago and read my results for the first time, I felt like someone was describing what I always knew about myself but never put into words before.  My primary strength is Activator.  Here is a brief description of an Activator: “Only action can make things happen. Only action leads to performance. Once a decision is made, you cannot not act. Others may worry that “there are still some things we don’t know,” but this doesn’t seem to slow you.”  (You can read the rest of the description at the Gallup Management Journal).

Being an Activator predisposes me to David Allen’s Getting Things Done personal management style and practices.  The other day I came across a blog post entitled, “The Cult of Done” and I thought I would share it with you.

The Cult of Done Manifesto

There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.

Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

There is no editing stage.

Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.

Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

Once you’re done you can throw it away.

Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.

People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

Destruction is a variant of done.

If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

Done is the engine of more.

Are there any other Activators out there?

What parts of the Done Manifesto resonate with you?