Leading Minds

Based on John Varney’s article in TJ, January

2006, p. 34-37
 Our Minds
• Much more than our brains
• Extend in time and space far beyond the
confines of our bodies
• Encompasses our memories and
aspirations, our relationships and
responsibilities
 “Corporate Minds”
• A shared mind-space to which many
contribute and from which corporate
actions rise
• Shape all human affairs and determine the
culture of the planet
 Can we Take responsibility for
influencing how others contribute
and what outcomes are sought?

Can we develop the minds of leaders?

Need for thinking
 Managers
• Need to think more than others
• Shape our futures, to ensure our wellbeing and
create wealth
• Strive to out think, to innovate, and turn good
thinking into excellent results
• Recognize that good thinking not confined to
managers but to also tap into the creativity of the
entire workforce
Innovation and competitive
performance depend on
effective leadership thinking
How do we learn thinking?
 All of Us
• Taught to think according to the prevailing
dispositions of the education system - not very
effective
• Education heavily biased towards preparing for
examinations, based on memory and set
formulae without enquiry or original thought
• Any errant originality quickly brought into line
Thinking in Schools
 LogoVisual Thinking (LVT)
• Methodology introduced • Catered for different
to teachers to teach abilities and useful for
thinking skills in schools training design, decision-
• Impressive results – making, investigation,
improved teachers’ own assessment and
thinking, improved management
relationships with their • Students found it
students, improved liberating, made learning
behaviour and enhanced fun and produced better
group dynamics and results; retained more
individual participation information and
understanding improved
What works in
organizations?
 Organizational context
• 20 years of • Work at every level –
application from frontline staff to
• People with no prior senior management
knowledge of the • Provides facilitators
method readily
brought to think with a powerful way
together – gathering for people to help
information, solving themselves
problems, developing
plans, deciding
actions, etc.
What’s new?
 PREVIOUS EFFORTS
• Brainstorming using Post-It notes

• Index cards in story

boarding at Disney
Studios

• Mind Mapping
 NOVELTY OF LVT

• Grouping such diverse

fragments into a coherent
methodology
• Introducing rigour that
illuminate and extend thinking
capacities
• Instead of just skimming the
surface, able to go to deep
mental depths
 LVT
• Simple principle of making individual ideas into
objects (by writing ideas into cards of some
sort), and
• Organizing them in a way that make sense to
everyone
• Then, reflecting until a change of meaning
occurs
• A sense-making process
 PARTICIPANTS

• Create meaning from their own raw

material and doing it themselves
• Own their results and there is no issue of
transfer or communicating between them
• Make sense together and iron out
misunderstanding and build relationships
REFINEMENTS AND APPLICATIONS

• Evolved over the years

• Worth investing in trained facilitators
• No end in what can be learned about and
through LVT, just as there is no end to
what and how human can learn t think
What tools are available?
 MagNotes

• The favourite medium, a magnetic dry-wipe

hexagons
• Come in different sizes and colours as well as
other shapes
• Displayed on steel-based whiteboards; you can
write and change what you wrote on both the
shapes and background
• Mobility and flexibility allows for people
changing their minds – their work always
remains work-in-progress
 There is something special
about letting people actually
touch one another’s thoughts
 PHYSICAL INTERACTIONS
• Subtle positioning develop meaning which cannot be
adequately captured in words
• Body intelligence comes into play as ‘people think with
their hands’
 PROCESS
• After everyone’s ideas are captured on the board, they
became shared material to fashion solutions
• Results captured as photographs or computer models
and also translated into conventional plans and reports
 COMPUTERS
• Software which mimics magnetic tools available
• Ideal for personal work, for some group
applications and for capturing outputs from
sessions using physical media
• Compute, but only minds can think!
What can I use LVT for?
 USUAGES

• Clarify your own thinking on difficult and

complex issues
• Relieve your mind of clutter by externalizing
half-thoughts ideas
• Address them as new ideas occur and invite
others to explore your thoughts
• Share with thinking processes with others
 FACILITATE THINKING OF
GROUPS
• Large groups can be engaged to think together
about a topic
• Especially valuable when many stakeholders
need common ground or share the results of
thinking process
 APPLICATIONS
• Numerous
• Exploring complex problems
• Building future scenarios
• Defining common purpose
• Seeking innovations
• Problem solving
• Process management
• Any domain requiring intelligent thinking will
benefit
What is the process?
 FIVE DISTINCT STAGES

1. Focus the question

2. Gather ideas
3. Organize the material
4. Integrate to reveal the underlying pattern
5. Apply accordingly
An example of how the process
worked
 A MANAGEMENT TEAM
• Around a dozen
• In the context of strategy-innovation workshop
• Off-site venue carefully chosen
• Introduction of ground rules of LVT
 1. The Question
• Focus the enquiry on the future the team aspired to
create
• Buying into the question enables to buying into the
outcome
 2. The IDEAS
• Team divided into syndicates to collect diverse
perspectives on what success would look like to them at
a future date
• Everyone participated and contributed to make random
display
• LVT did not require getting agreement - gave voice to
quieter participant; allow greater freedom and enabled
marginal and minority ideas to enrich the mix
 3. ORGANIZING THE IDEAS
• Each group sort their ideas into meaningful
clusters
• Critical part involving profound negotiations
• Everyone engaged in making sense of subtle
relationships of ideas
• Titling encapsulated the meaning of each cluster
as articulated by participants
 4. INTEGRATION
• Groups first share what they did to appreciate the
diversity of perspectives
• Then post abstracted titles from MagNotes onto a new
board to create a single shared picture of future success
• Reveal a system structure enabling the translation of
aspirations into objectives and to develop strategies for
achieving them
 5. APPLICATION
• Exploring and agreeing on:
• how the strategies need to be communicated and fitted
into the business plan
 Core LVT PROCESS

• Took no more than 2 or 3 hours within a workshop of 48

hours duration
• Effortless and enjoyable
• Freed up time for wider personal and inter-personal
development processes
• Prepared the team for commitment
DETAILS OF THE LVT
METHODOLOGY
 1. Focus
• Facilitator may have a good idea about the question, but
should check with the participants
• Selecting the “right” participants – those who have a
stake in the outcome – is essential
• Participants have more knowledge of the issues at hand
than the facilitator, but need the opportunity to clarify,
refine or refocus the question to address the underlying
concerns
 2. GATHER
• Simple principles
• Write clearly so that others can read
• Write one idea per MagNote
• Use full clear statements, not buzzwords
• Use a verb
• Be specific
• Everyone writes their own
• Participants hold back judgment and not try to agree
• Facilitator exercised cursory engagement
 3. ORGANIZE
• Period of energized conversation
• Begin by looking for pairs of ideas that seem to relate
• Avoid pre-determined categories and grouping ideas into
simplistic key words
• Cluster of ideas emerge
• Then participants can title them
• ‘Titling’ itself is an abstraction of meaning from a diverse
content; the quality is critical
 Let the ideas tell you
themselves where the want to
be
 4. INTEGRATE
• Pattern best revealed by writing titles onto new
MagNotes placed on a fresh board
• Begin to explore the relationships between the various
items
• May just look for cause-effect relationships and produce
systems model
• Can use other means of challenging ourselves to think
more deeply
• Facilitators should not do the work for the group but push
to stretch their thinking to new levels
 5. APPLY
• Need good strategies and plans and be prepared
• Planning of action is a preparation
• Clarity and alignment provided by the LVT process will
enhance our capability
Advantages of the LVT
methodology
 Immediately engaging
 Aligns stakeholders to their common purposes
 Gives ownership to participants
 Enables everyone to contribute to the form as well
as content
 Give voice to the silent and restrains the dominant
 Encourages exploration of meaning
 Allows new insights to emerge
 Frees facilitator to manage the process from a
deeper level
LVT comes of age
• Used extensively with excellent results in the
management context
• Can be shared with practitioners of all kinds
• LVT is intuitive but there is rigour that contributes to
quality results