Are you a project or change professional looking to connect the dots with greater ease? Look no further.
A more innovative way to learn
I remember watching the movie Limitless, and it made me think about how we use our brain’s potential. Eddie Morra is the main character who is introduced to a wonder drug. This drug (NZT) gives him seemingly limitless cognitive capacity. Imagine what life would be like if absorbing complex ideas was easy. Retrieving any concept from your memory is smooth and liquid, and your thoughts flow quickly and seemingly from out of nowhere?
It would be wonderful to connect the dots without any true effort and just-in-time, depending on your circumstances. It would be even better to be entirely in the moment, in a state of flow.
In other words, enjoying clear and powerful thinking.
Your brain has this potential. It’s just like with anything in life-the reality is not as sexy or effortless as what the movies portray. Your brain needs time to both prepare and reflect. Uninterrupted focus brings you closer to your potential.
What part does luck play in bringing your ideas together? Can we use systems to capture ideas and concepts then join them together in a somewhat chaotic yet somehow coherent map?
Clear and powerful thinking
Yes, we can. Enter the increasing power of personal knowledge systems. They are becoming more accessible and are not solely for the domain of creative propeller-heads. If you work on projects, you may need to learn many complicated ideas and ever-moving parts. Those gifted with the ability to move seamlessly between the big picture and detailed thinking have a distinct advantage on projects. Many people with this gift often move into project leadership roles mainly because they can do this very well.
This gift relies on a powerful memory and extraordinary abstract thinking abilities. Throw in a touch of creativity to project your thinking forward, and you are a precious commodity. This is particularly the case on projects or programs with a complicated solution and stakeholder terrain.
Yet what if you don’t have this gift? Or you don’t have time to commit to hours of deep work? You may have many employees reporting to you, and distractions are a part of your daily routine. Is your focus limited to 30-minute increments, and sometimes not even that?
Furthermore, your focus may not be geared to quickly joining the dots between seemingly unrelated concepts. You might prefer dealing with tangible ideas and problems in the here-and-now. Hopefully, there is some creative genius on your team who can think outside the box.
Here is some good news. Personal knowledge systems can help act as your “second brain”. If you get hit with an idea at three in the morning, you can enter the idea into your personal knowledge system. Come across a thought-provoking article? You can share this article with your “second brain”. Want to really study and immerse yourself in a given topic? Again, your “second brain” helps you move between the bigger picture and detailed notes.
Personal knowledge systems
It’s vital that any system that becomes part of my “productivity stack” is available on mobile phone, tablet, and computer. The applications on all three platforms need to seamlessly sync with each other.
Although apps like Better Notes may do the job, you can use simple yet powerful outliner systems like Workflowy. Database-style notetaking apps like Notion or Airtable are excellent contenders for this job. Both give you a more three-dimensional or relational database view of the world.
Book writers and PhD research students often swear by software like Scrivener. Yet the project professionals who are not deep-diving into a single topic over an extended timeframe, other tools might fit the bill a little bit better.
Yet a lot of the power of connecting notes is via a beautiful overview graph. By seeing the bigger picture, you might then be comfortable in drilling into details which interest you. I prefer to learn by starting with global concepts then exploring the detail for ideas that interest me.
Thus the type of system that works very well for me is a competition between Roam Research and Obsidian. md. Obsidian is free to use, unlike Roam Research. If you want to sink Obsidian. md data amongst your mobile, tablet, and computer, there is a monthly fee. The monthly cost is still less than Roam Research’s monthly subscription fee. I was also impressed by Obsidian’s graphical overview.
How I use it
When I was writing the Change Manager’s Companion, I needed a way to organise my thoughts. I used Workflowy as a brilliant way to outline these thoughts. If you do plan to write a book: budget for at least 12 months. It doesn’t matter if you’ve had 16 coffees and work 16 hours a day for several weeks. You may even be inspired by National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Could you write 50,000 words of a novel during the 30 days of November?
The reason I say 12 months is it gives your ideas time to ferment. It took me about 16–18 months, but I had distractions. Your outline will change, and you will find better ways to articulate ideas. Sometimes leaving your writing for a few weeks and coming back with a “fresh pair of eyes” makes a difference. But back to Obsidian. I came across this app just as I’d completed my book. It is an effective way to link all my ideas about change management and complementary disciplines.
I have random ideas which I can easily add to my personal system. These ideas are interlinked to other ideas, topic themes and creative artefacts. Suppose I’m writing another book or creating an online course. In that case, each thought that goes into my system ultimately links to one or more creative artefacts.
If I run out of inspiration, my system effectively becomes a “digital garden”. I visit my garden to gain inspiration from the fruit of these interconnected ideas. Over time my garden became more extensive and complicated. Yet your garden ages like a fine wine (or growing bacteria like blue cheese!).
Sometimes I don’t visit my “digital garden” for a few months. While I add random ideas to it sometimes every day and sometimes as little as once a week, I don’t often need to visit the garden. Yet when I do, I can see the fruits of my labour, and it often inspires new ideas and ways of thinking about a topic.
This is particularly handy for writing new additions to my publication Human Factors and Change. I work full-time as a contractor in the Change Management space. When starting on new projects, I need to shut myself off the world and immerse myself deeply in the industry I am working in. I also need great focus to construct my change on a page and link many ideas and concepts together. This linkage results in a coherent change plan.
Why do I share my sources of competitive advantage with you? If you have read this far, you are probably a high-achieving project or change professional in your own right. You would at least have the attention span to stick with my ramblings. Thus you deserve the benefits of the fruits of dozens of my hours spent finding the best systems which work for me.
I hope this source of a competitive advantage-this incredible system that works for me-works for you too.
Our book — The Change Manager’s Companion — is available now. You can also check out our online course on Change Management.