How to make full use of your brainpower

“Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven. ”

— Edward De Bono

What do YOU do when you have to prepare for an important meeting? What do you do when you have to make an important decision or a decision in which the right answer is not so clear? Like most people, I used to do the thing that comes most naturally to everyone; get so familiar with the facts that there is no way that anyone can refute what I’m saying. Or I take the logical approach and jot down all the pros and cons (like in deciding to take on a new job). If the pros outweigh the cons, then the decision is made. Simple right? If this is the right way to go about making decisions then why is it that it hardly ever works? You have all the facts and yet you’re unable to convince the other person of your point of view or influence then to come around to your way of thinking. Why is it that sometimes, despite the fact the pros outweigh the cons, the logical decision still doesn’t feel right.

The reason is, you’re not actually using your brain to think. Your brain has so much processing power and yet most of us don’t have a way to utilise it. Your intelligence is not determined by how well you do academically. Most of that is based on well you can rote learn. You’ll find that a lot of the kids at school who did well academically (the nerds or squares as I used to be called) don’t seem to do as well in life. That’s because school is highly regimented and biased towards rewarding those who can rote learn. Unfortunately, real life is highly unstructured and being good at rote learning doesn’t do very much if you can’t apply it. Our centuries old production line schooling system is so biased towards forcing us to learn facts and figures (e.g. history) that it completely misses the more important role of teaching us how to think and how to make maximum use of our brainpower.

But there is a very simple structured approach with a series of just four questions that I have found works wonders in forcing my brain to utilise all its processing power, and most importantly give me different perspectives on the one decision.

The four questions are based on Edward De Bono’s book “Teach Yourself to Think”. I highly recommend you read this book and apply the concepts within. I came across this book a while back when I was in a desperate situation. This was early on in my career and I had seen friends and family members do better than me in life and at work. As a former nerd and almost a straight A student in school, I simply couldn’t understand what was going on. Just recalling that period as I write this blog still brings up the sense of dread. Why is it that everyone seems to be doing better than me? Am I really that stupid? So I started Googling, using phrases like “how to get smarter” or “how to be successful”. But the one that took me to the book was “how to think better”. Since purchasing the book, I have read it four times and have continually applied and refined it. I emphasise that I strongly encourage you to purchase and read the book. It’s not long and over time, as you apply it, you will develop a short cut version that works for you. Below, I share the simplified steps I take in alignment with Edward De Bono’s process that has helped me to think better and forces my brain to utilise all its capabilities.

STEP 1 - WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF YOUR THINKING

Before you start preparing for a meeting or thinking about an important decision, stop, take a deep breath, and ask yourself, what is the purpose or outcome you are trying to achieve? It seems trivial but it is one of the most important steps. The moment you apply this, you realise that you actually don’t know the answer and in the past, all your efforts and brainpower have gone immediately into memorising facts or focused on random thoughts that have not aligned to take you towards your goal. Why? Because you haven’t defined the goal yet.

To illustrate, I’ll share a real world example with you. When I prepare for Board meetings quarterly, I start about two weeks ahead of the meeting day itself. In my office (or somewhere quiet where I won’t get disturbed), I jot down version one of the question:

• The purpose of my thinking is to define how best to present myself at the Board meeting.

Immediately, I see that this is such a vague and useless purpose. I need to refine it. So version two becomes:

• The purpose of my thinking is to define how to present myself as a highly competent and successful Executive.

Better but still kind of vague. Notice that by this stage I haven’t applied any thinking yet. I’m focused on defining the outcome. After several iterations (I’ve hit 12 iterations once), I arrived at the following:

• The purpose of my thinking is determine how to present myself as a successful Executive with a founder’s mentality through the clear and concise conveying of key thematic issues and solutions to move the Function forward.

Can you see how through an iterative process to answer a simple but important question that you now have a clear end goal to focus your brainpower on. Without this defined end goal, your thinking over the next few hours or days would just be meandering. Picking up bits of facts and figures that don’t align towards anything. In my case, without the above, I would’ve just presented on all the facts and figures on what’s been achieved during the quarter. We’ve all been in those kinds of meetings. The presenter talks at you through charts and graphs. Don’t be like those people.

With clarity of the end goal, you can now move into Step 2.

STEP 2 - DEFINE THE COMPONENTS OF YOUR GOAL

Again, this step seems trivially simple but is important. In this step, you focus on asking yourself questions on what’s needed to achieve the purpose you have defined. Keep the questions at a high level as you can address them in the next step. If you find that you’ve landed on more than 10 questions, then stop there. Either the purpose can be further refined or the questions can be grouped together.

Using the example purpose defined in STEP 1 above, the questions I’d arrive at are:

• What are the clear and concise key messages I want to convey? What specific examples or figures best illustrate these messages?

• What are the dots that I can join to give me an overall theme?

• What is the Board expecting? What have they asked for in the past?

• What is my boss expecting?

• What does the CEO expect?

• How do I talk to demonstrate founder’s mentality?

Contrast Step 2 with how you normally think or prepare for meetings. Hopefully you can immediately see how by just doing these two steps, you’ve arrived at questions or perspectives that you might not have thought of had you just dived straight into preparation.

Now to complete Step 2, you jot down points to answer each of the above questions. I’ll give you an example that has prevented me from getting into trouble. So in terms of “what does the CEO expect”, one of the answers I defined was “not to be surprised”. With this one answer, it triggered me to lock in a meeting with him, walk through my thoughts on what I want to present, and it ensured that he wasn’t caught off guard during the Board meeting. When people are caught off guard, getting them to support you on an idea is next to impossible.

STEP 3 - PERSPECTIVES

This steps builds on some of the questions on STEP 2. In this step, you think about the different stakeholders in your audience. It can be by role, by individual or by groups if you’re talking to a larger crowd. Again, this step is trivially simple, what do each stakeholder know or don’t know. This step helps you to build into your preparation, important information that are needed to bridge the knowledge gap between them and get them onto the same page as you.

Continuing on with the example above, I’d ask myself the following:

• What does the Board know or don’t know - in my case, there would be important developments that occurred during the quarter that caused me to make certain decisions, which they wouldn’t be aware of.

• What does the CEO know or don’t know - given his busy schedule and focus, he probably knows the key facts but perhaps not what actions have been taken.

• What does my boss know or don’t know - my boss trusts me and takes a relatively hands-off approach. What he doesn’t know is probably the challenges I’ve faced in getting to the desired outcome.

• Also important, is how do I demonstrate my founder’s mentality? These would be the value-add things that I’ve done day to day, which neither the CEO nor the Board would have sight of. So now I need to focus on how to bring specific examples of these into the conversation.

By answering the above questions, you brain is forced to adopt the different stakeholders’ perspectives and see the scenario from their eyes. This is an important element that is often lost if you just dive right into thinking or preparation.

STEP 4 - STRUCTURE THE SOLUTION

Now that you have asked the right questions and jotted down the answers, you are ready to put them together into a solution. This step is where you get creative because you should have at least two different versions of the solution to see which is best. As you rehearse the meeting in your mind, it is likely slightly newer solutions will emerge. Game them out and see which is better.

How do you structure the solution? If a vague version hasn’t emerged as you go through the above steps then simply jot down your points sequentially. What point do you want to make first, what facts support that point, what explanations do you have to give to bridge the various perspectives, and what do you wrap up with to demonstrate your founder’s mentality? From this initial version, you’ll find that ideas will emerge and you will pivot into different iterations.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Putting all of the steps above together, for the last Board meeting, I arrived at the following solution, which received tremendous feedback:

• Raise the two key themes identified through the underlying work achieved during the quarter with two specific fact to illustrate the rationale.

• Articulate three specific examples of how my team took direct action to offset of mitigate those themes, including the stakeholders we’ve had to engage and the challenges we faced in getting to that outcome.

• Raise that we received support and guidance from the CEO and CRO to get to this point.

• Conclude with the two actions the team are currently driving across the Group, which we will report back on next quarter.

I don’t have a particularly high IQ. But I have enough awareness to know that I wasn’t always fully using what brainpower I do have. By applying concepts in “Teach Yourself to Think” and refining it to a version that works for me, I now have a simple process that at the very least helps me to see different perspectives and maximises what I can extract out of my brain. By sharing this with you, I’m hoping that you can achieve the same benefits.

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