Educational Ponderings

I had another wonderful lightbulb moment this week. It was another case of several things serendipitously aligning and clicking into place. Why was it important? Because it helped me understand what drives me, and why I think like I do. It helped me understand what makes me be me.

Let me explain.

Time to think

I have been a fan of the Thinking Environment since I re-encountered it three years ago. Since then, I have become a trained facilitator and have sought opportunities to introduce colleagues to it whenever I can. The Thinking Environment aims to create an easeful space for doing your best thinking. It is not uncommon that people tell me that having the dedicated, uninterrupted thinking space, where they receive encouragement and appreciation for their thinking with no distractions, leads to much greater revelations that smaller amount of time than they have had over the previous weeks or even months. I firmly believe that having this kind of time to think in depth is vital, especially when things are particularly busy.

Essentialism

I have also recently discovered that I am at my heart an Essentialist. An Essentialist is a believer that by doing less, we can achieve more. That we need to seek to remove the noise of tasks that are not making the best use of our skills and that are not working towards achieving the most important goal. In doing so, we can focus on what is the highest priority and move that forward to a far greater extent than we could if we were trying to achieve many different unaligned tasks, without a sense of coherence or priority. An Essentialist finds the bigger picture and understands how things fit together. They find the coherent whole that is the highest level priority and focus on aligning efforts to achieve it. All those that know me will tell you that I do this by constantly asking “why?” whenever we are considering new or next steps in a project. At the core of who I am, is the person that needs to know “why?”, what is the bigger picture at the centre of this challenge or situation and how does it fit with everything else going on around it? Until we have our Why, we cannot, and I would argue, should not, proceed to next steps. If we do, then we end up without a clear path ahead. We start do try to do too many things because we don’t have our focus.

Purposeful design

So, what to do once we have identified the Why, and have sight of our bigger picture? The final defining element I consider to be fundamental to what I do, is that I believe in the value of purposeful design. Those around me will attest to my encouragement to use Theory of Change to maximise the likelihood of achieving our goals (not least because it requires the goals to be explicitly well articulated from the outset). Theory of Change says that once we have our well articulated goal, then we can build an evidence informed framework that considers who, what, where, when and finally, how we can most effectively achieve that goal and how we will know when we have been successful. It is our framework for aligning and prioritising our efforts.

Realisation

And that was my lightbulb moment. Suddenly it clicked. With these three elements, I understand what drives me to do what I do. I believe that through combining these three approaches we can achieve greater things and by doing less. Before diving in and trying to solve every individual problem as it arises, if we can take time to think in depth to find what connects our challenges and to see the bigger picture, then we can align our efforts and utilise our skills to their greatest extent to achieve our goal. My lightbulb moment was in realising that I am a firm believer that by doing this we have the greatest likelihood of achieving success, and hopefully not be overwhelmed in the process.

Thank you for your time. I hope my few thoughts on recognising how my brain works may help others to ponder on what helps drives them too.

A haiku for change

Breath. Take time to think.

Find the bigger picture. Pause.

Craft Theory of Change. Begin.