Juggle with the Struggle to avoid Distraction
It’s 2021. Concentration is in short supply.
With so many distractions lying in wait Concentration is very hard to sustain each day. And especially hard as time goes on during the working day and your mind turns to domestic things you need to get done.
Concentration has become harder as our reliance (addiction) on technology grows. Today, we are offered so many distractors - from alerts and emails to the 100 times per day we look at our smartphones.
Or you could be in a Zoom meeting when you get a notification from Twitter that a ship has got stuck in the Suez Canal blocking global exports (and you’d better do something about it). And with that, you're distracted, the meeting already fading into background noise.
But you can't be blamed because it’s the era of technology and fast information. So fast in fact that our brains might be having trouble keeping up.
It's not just video games and headphones that are making it harder to concentrate. Think about the technology we use for work alone - Emails, task managers, zoom, digital calendars ...
While they do make work more seamless, they also add to the number of things our brain is forced to manage and concentrate on during the day. It's a wonder we manage to concentrate on anything at all!
Yet, concentration is crucial to being effective and explaining improvement ideas. We can have many ideas throughout the day. However, every single idea is not implementable (or even desirable). And always, ideas need refining before they can become innovation (or even be marginal gain).
There is no doubt that sharing ideas with colleagues and managers is an effective innovation and productivity step, but done in the wrong way, or at the wrong time, it is just as likely to be a waste of time and the opposite of making progress.
Enter Consideration
Consideration is welcomed by users because it helps you Persuade and avoid Distraction. It helps you get your idea implemented. It is a system that ensures you don't waste time by presenting your peers or your manager with a badly argued idea, which could be ignored or neglected. Consideration avoids this undesirable outcome by tackling what we find to be the main problem - lack of concentration which contributes to lack of clear and empathetic explanation. As we all know, but do not practice often enough, the key to success is doing one thing – and completing that one thing – at a time. We all also know that the cost of multi-tasking and the price of distraction is very high.
Explanation- one point at a time
You could say that the Consideration process is brainstorming without the storm.
We take idea authors on a short journey with their idea; through a series of questions along with hints to help them clarify the problem ( the struggle), its causes and its desired outcomes and implications.
This ensures four important things:
1. It becomes clear that the author understands the situation.
2. The idea is expressed and described clearly.
3. Other stakeholders can much more easily contribute to making the idea better and more easily implementable.
4. Time is saved because there is no need to endlessly overcome objections that lack merit or spread confusion. The solution is being co- created. There is no “not invented here” rejection clause. Every idea is invented here.
This method of gathering ideas motivates and enables people to think deeply and always take others’ needs into account. Which is the definition of - wait for it – Consideration!
Innovation? 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration
We understand that innovation is hard work; and it requires clear thinking that is obtained with concentration and consideration of real needs. Our mission is to help you gain that concentration with our question-based process so that companies can speed up the process of Continuous Improvement by increasing the quality of ideas generated.
We encourage you to implement our six-week trial. Doing so – without cost or commitment - is the best way to understand the immediate and sustained value Consideration brings to your innovation arsenal.