Getting Things Done (11 page)

When I get people to focus on a successful scenario of their project, they usually experience heightened enthusiasm and think of something unique and positive about it that hadn’t occurred to them before. “Wouldn’t it be great if . . .” is not a bad way to start thinking about a situation, at least for long enough to have the option of getting an answer.

Once you know what you want to have happen,
and why,
the “how” mechanism is brought into play. When you identify with some picture in your mind that is different from your current reality, you automatically start filling in the gaps, or brainstorming. Ideas begin to pop into your head in somewhat random order—little ones, big ones, not-so-good ones, good ones. This process usually goes on internally for most people about most things, and that’s often sufficient. For example, you think about what you want to say to your boss as you’re walking down the hall to speak to her. But there are many other instances when writing things down, or capturing them in some external way, can give a tremendous boost to productive output and thinking.

Over the last few decades, a number of graphics-oriented brainstorming techniques have been introduced to help develop creative thinking about projects and topics. They’ve been called things like mind-mapping, clustering, patterning, webbing, and fish-boning. Although the authors of these various processes may portray them as being different from one another, for most of us end-users the basic premise remains the same: give yourself permission to capture and express
any
idea, and then later on figure out how it fits in and what to do with it. If nothing else (and there is plenty of “else”), this practice adds to your efficiency—when you have the idea, you grab it, which means you won’t have to go “have the idea” again.

The most popular of these techniques is called mindmapping, a name coined by Tony Buzan, a British researcher in brain functioning, to label this process of brainstorming ideas onto a graphic format. In mind-mapping, the core idea is presented in the center, with associated ideas growing out in a somewhat free-form fashion around it. For instance, if I found out that I had to move my office, I might think about computers, changing my business cards, all the connections I’d have to change, new furniture, moving the phones, purging and packing, and so on. If I captured these thoughts graphically it might start to look something like this:

You could do this kind of mind-mapping on Post-its that could be stuck on a whiteboard, or you could input ideas into a word processor or outlining program on the computer.

The great thing about external brainstorming is that in addition to capturing your original ideas, it can help generate many new ones that might not have occurred to you if you didn’t have a mechanism to hold your thoughts and continually reflect them back to you. It’s as if your mind were to say, “Look, I’m only going to give you as many ideas as you feel you can effectively use. If you’re not collecting them in some trusted way, I won’t give you that many. But if you’re actually doing something with the ideas—even if it’s just recording them for later evaluation—then here, have a bunch! And, oh wow! That reminds me of another one, and another,” etc.

Psychologists are beginning to label this and similar processes “distributed cognition.” It’s getting things out of your head and into objective, reviewable formats. But my English teacher in high school didn’t have to know about the theory to give me the key: “David,” he said, “you’re going to college, and you’re going to be writing papers. Write all your notes and quotes on separate three-by-five cards. Then, when you get ready to organize your thinking, just spread them all out on the floor, see the structure, and figure out what you’re missing.” Mr. Edmund son was teaching me a major piece of the natural planning model!

Few people can hold their focus on a topic for more than a couple of minutes, without some objective structure and tool or trigger to help them. Pick a big project you have going right now and just try to think of nothing else for more than sixty seconds. This is pretty hard to do unless you have a pen and paper in hand and use those “cognitive artifacts” as the anchor for your ideas. Then you can stay with it for hours. That’s why good thinking can happen while you’re working on a computer document about a project, mind-mapping it on a legal pad or on a paper tablecloth in a hip restaurant, or just having a meeting about it with other people in a room that allows you to hold the context (a whiteboard with nice wet markers really helps there, too).

Many techniques can be used to facilitate brainstorming and out-of-the-box thinking. The basics principles, however, can be summed up as follows:

Don’t Judge, Challenge, Evaluate, or Criticize
It’s easy for the unnatural planning model to rear its ugly head in brainstorming, making people jump to premature evaluations and critiques of ideas. If you care even slightly about what a critic thinks, you’ll censure your expressive process as you look for the “right” thing to say. There’s a very subtle distinction between keeping brainstorming on target with the topic and stifling the creative process. It’s also important that brainstorming be put into the overall context of the planning process, because if you think you’re doing it just for its own sake, it can seem trite and inappropriately off course. If you can understand it instead as something you’re doing right now, for a certain period, before you move toward a resolution at the end, you’ll feel more comfortable giving this part of the process its due.

This is not to suggest that you should shut off critical thinking, though—everything ought to be fair game at this stage. It’s just wise to understand what kinds of thoughts you’re having and to park them for use in the most appropriate way. The primary criterion must be expansion, not contraction.

 

Go for Quantity, Not Quality
Going for quantity keeps your thinking expansive. Often you won’t know what’s a good idea until you have it. And sometimes you’ll realize it’s a good idea, or the germ of one, only later on. You know how shopping at a big store with lots of options lets you feel comfortable about your choice? The same holds true for project thinking. The greater the volume of thoughts you have to work with, the better the context you can create for developing options and trusting your choices.

 

Put Analysis and Organization in the Background
Analysis and evaluation and organization of your thoughts should be given as free a rein as creative out-of-the-box thinking. But in the brainstorming phase, this critical activity should not be the driver.

Making a list can be a creative thing to do, a way to consider the people who should be on your team, the customer requirements for the software, or the components of the business plan. Just make sure to grab all that and keep going until you get into the weeding and organizing of focus that make up the next stage.

If you’ve done a thorough job of emptying your head of all the things that came up in the brainstorming phase, you’ll notice that a natural organization is emerging. As my high school English teacher suggested, once you get all the ideas out of your head and in front of your eyes, you’ll automatically notice natural relationships and structure. This is what most people are referring to when they talk about “project plans.”

Organizing usually happens when you identify components and subcomponents, sequences or events, and/or priorities. What are the things that must occur to create the final result? In what order must they occur? What is the most important element to ensure the success of the project?

This is the stage in which you can make good use of structuring tools ranging from informal bullet points, scribbled literally on the back of an envelope, to project-planning software like Microsoft Project. When a project calls for substantial objective control, you’ll need some type of hierarchical outline with components and subcomponents, and/or a GANTT-type chart showing stages of the project laid out over time, with independent and dependent parts and milestones identified in relationship to the whole.

Creative thinking doesn’t stop here; it just takes another form. Once you perceive a basic structure, your mind will start trying to “fill in the blanks.” Identifying three key things that you need to handle on the project, for example, may cause you to think of a fourth and a fifth when you see them all lined up.

The key steps here are:

I have never seen any two projects that needed to have exactly the same amount of structure and detail developed in order to get things off people’s minds and moving successfully. But almost all projects can use some form of creative thinking from the left side of the brain, along the lines of “What’s the plan?”

The final stage of planning comes down to decisions about the allocation and reallocation of physical resources to actually get the project moving. The question to ask here is, “What’s the next action?”

As we noted in the previous chapter, this kind of grounded, reality-based thinking, combined with clarification of the desired outcome, forms the critical component of knowledge work. In my experience, creating a list of what your real projects are and consistently managing your next action for each one will constitute 90 percent of what is generally thought of as project planning. This “runway level” approach will make you “honest” about all kinds of things: Are you really serious about doing this? Who’s responsible? Have you thought things through enough?

At some point, if the project is an actionable one, this next-action decision must be made.
³
Answering the question about what specifically you would do about something physically if you had nothing else to do will test the maturity of your thinking about the project. If you’re not yet ready to answer that question, you have more to flesh out at some prior level in the natural planning sequence.

Activating the “Moving Parts”
A project is sufficiently planned for implementation when every next-action step has been decided on every front that can actually be moved on without some other component’s having to be completed first. If the project has multiple components, each of them should be assessed appropriately by asking, “Is there something that anyone could be doing on this right now?” You could be coordinating speakers for the conference, for instance, at the same time that you’re finding the appropriate site.

In some cases there will be only one aspect that can be activated, and everything else will depend on the results of that. So there may be only one next action, which will be the linchpin for all the rest.

 

More to Plan?
What if there’s still more planning to be done before you can feel comfortable with what’s next? There’s still an action step—it is just a
process
action. What’s the next step in the continuation of planning? Drafting more ideas. E-mailing Ana Maria and Sean to get their input. Telling your assistant to set up a planning meeting with the product team.

The habit of clarifying the next action on projects, no matter what the situation, is fundamental to you staying in relaxed control.

 

When the Next Action Is Someone Else’s . . .
If the next action is not yours, you must nevertheless clarify whose it is (this is a primary use of the “Waiting For” action list). In a group-planning situation, it isn’t necessary for everyone to know what the next step is on every part of the project. Often all that’s required is to allocate responsibility for parts of the project to the appropriate persons and leave it up to them to identify next actions on their particular pieces.