The Five Elements of Effective Thinking

One of the premises of the book is that in fact all of these skills are related to each other, and the same habits can be used to augment and improve all of those wonderfully effective skills. If you have in mind that you want your people in the organisation to be more innovative and to see opportunities, then you can adopt the strategies that are rather practical to actually make those innovations, creativity and problem-solving more effective.

Female interviewer: So, what aspects of the leader’s or manager’s role do you think that your book is best placed to help people with?

Michael Starbird: I think that the effect of the strategies in the book is that it could alter the way a leader looks at what kind of encouragement that he/she tries to induce in the organisation. Some of the strategies that you’ll hear about later are things like making mistakes in a productive way: well, you can build that into the system so that that becomes part of what it is that you encourage your people under your management to work on. So the concept is that leaders and managers can encourage the people and themselves to look at their organisations in effective ways that will lead actually to better results.

Female interviewer: Edward Burger continues by providing us with an overview of the five elements of effective thinking.

Edward Burger: It is important to remember these aren’t in any kind of particular linear order. In fact they synergistically connect with one another. Both Mike and I are educators at the university level and we found that in fact people can change and in fact that is the whole point of education; is to transform lives and to make people their very best self. And that is certainly true at the management level and leadership level across all professions, that we can, by intent, be better people. That will only happen, however, if we change our habits and so the book is really an invitation to change those habits.

Female interviewer: Could you tell us a bit more about that first element: understanding deeply?

Michael Starbird: One of the things that is the richest source for insight into the highest levels of understanding is to go back to the fundamentals and understand them much more deeply than you ever imagined you could. If you are running a company, thinking about what the actual goal of the entire organisation is can alter what it is that you do on a daily basis, the decisions you make. If you go back to the basics, the effect is that you understand those basics at a far more instructive way than you ever understood them when you were first learning them.

Female interviewer: The second element, making mistakes, is one that may people may find surprising. Can you tell us some more about it?

Edward Burger: Well, failure is a really wonderful and can be a powerful step towards great success, great innovation and great creativity. It’s a matter of how we perceive failure and it’s a matter of how we exploit failure. So, what we mean by failing as a mode to success is the idea of taking risks, going beyond and actually almost like a stress test, kind of tweaking or twisting a piece of steel girder to see where it breaks and then we learn something by, whether it’s looking at an extreme case or whether it’s just by trying something very quickly, knowing it’s not going to go well. What we see is a new insight because when we fail there is a very specific action that is at our disposal, which is we can ask ‘Why did that fail and what do we learn from that experience?’ And that is a step forward.

So, think of it like a chess board. Failure is a square that we land on with the goal of moving off and the true measure is how far a square can we go from there, how far can we travel from that failed attempt. You can imagine management and leadership could embrace this as a management technique to encourage failure, saying, in fact, ‘I want to give credit to people that come up with innovative but mistaken ideas because I want you to think.’

Female interviewer: Are there any practical tips that can help people get past the fear of failure and start learning from their mistakes?

Edward Burger: Don’t stare at a blank screen. Open up a file on the computer and start typing away, whether it is brainstorming and free form thinking or just writing, and then work from there and then bring in the innovative process that is requisite for any kind of important creative thinking. Which is, now, you take an idea and you refine it, you tweak it, you hone it and that’s a way of actually building something much, much greater through the process of iteration.

That involves few basic steps, starting early and trying to do it really quickly and just getting ideas down on the page.

Female interviewer: Raising questions is the third element of effective thinking. Can you tell us a bit more about it?

Michael Starbird: Many people think of questions as sort of negative things, you know, in my world they think of it as tests but in fact by constantly thinking of questions, that’s the way to move forward. It’s often the questions that are more important than the answers.

So let me give you a practical suggestion that a manager or a leader in an organisation can adopt to make that organisation more effective. Ask people to raise questions. Now here’s what I mean by this. When I am teaching in a class I do not say, ‘Are there are any questions?’ Instead I say, ‘Take one minute and talk to your neighbour and write down two questions because I want everybody to think that raising questions is just part of everyday life. That there are always questions.’ So if you have a manager or a leader in an organisation who is constantly challenging people not to come up with answers to questions that that leader has thought of but to come up with questions, then that changes the entire conduct of the organisation.

Female interviewer: The fourth element is following the flow of ideas. What exactly does this involve?

Edward Burger: What we mean by the flow of ideas is the realisation that there is no idea that sits in a vacuum, that every idea evolved from previous ideas and every idea will actually lead to another idea.

Why is it so important? Well, first of all, to realise that every idea came from something actually makes the current idea that you are trying to understand or the current scenario or the current situation or the current, you know, business strategy that much easier to understand and that much better to appreciate.

Now, that being said, there is another side to this coin, which is looking forward. You know, most people in the professional world, when they have a new idea it’s a cause for celebration but of course the kind of thinking that Mike and I are trying to provoke here is one where the habit is you see a new idea and now you don’t celebrate but in fact that’s the time when you roll up your sleeves and get to work. What else can we do with it? How can we extend it? How can we exploit it? How can we generalise it? How can we use it better for our purposes? How can we do something new with it that we haven’t done before? That’s a mindset, that’s a habit that we can think about that actually will allow us to move forward.

Female interviewer: The fifth and final element of effective thinking is change. Can you talk us through what this means?

Michael Starbird: The fifth element of change says that by adopting the strategies, the understanding deep way that making mistakes on a regular basis, the raising questions so that you’re focusing your attention appropriately and by seeing that there’s a flow of ideas that came from some place and are going places. By adopting the strategies and constantly turning to those, you will inevitably be more successful, you will inevitably come up with creative ideas; you will inevitably see opportunities and seize them. The outcome is inevitable from a change. You are doing something different, not doing the same thing harder.

Female interviewer: What kind of changes should leaders and managers be able to make after reading the book and putting your ideas into practice?

Edward Burger: The book is a very personal book in that what you get out of it is really what you put into it and how much, you know, effort you exhort. I think some people are going to resonate with some of the elements more than others. It seems in our experience that universally the most interesting one to people is the failure one and the fact that in each of the chapters, in each of the five elements that we offer, we actually offer action items: deliberate things to do that will provoke thinking. If you make these action items and habits part of how you work in your everyday life, you will actually come up with new ideas. That’s just a fact. And just reading it through and putting it away and letting dust collect will not change anyone. It’s when they decide they want to be a different, better person and they use these prompts, these thought-provoking prompts to actually allow them to flourish, that is when, in fact, leaders and managers will be able to see the real fruit of what’s out there and their real total possibility to be innovative and creative and to inspire that amongst their team.

Female interviewer: Thank you for listening to our interview with Edward Burger and Michael Starbird on The Five Elements of Effective Thinking.