NEED SPACE TO THINK?

Time goes by…so slowly”. Do you know the song I mean? I can understand that some people experience life like that and it may seem like a bad thing to them. But when that haunting refrain drifts out of my radio I just think “If only!”

Life races along for me – the compulsive “to do” list rarely gets shorter and I’m scrambling to finish work by deadlines. I pack meetings and networking opportunities into the diary like a demon, pleased that I’ve made another great contact and that they want to talk to me. Every morning I wake up with a task prioritisation struggle already going on in my head and a feeling that I’ll never get it all done in the time available. Well I do (get it all done), generally, and I feel great about my achievements. But there is something I’m failing on – badly. And it’s been happening like that for years. Space to think.

I’m not talking here about time management. I can carve out time if I need to – in fact I’m a master at holding a straight line across a task battlefield as the crisis landmines go off and the displacement activity grenades fly past my head. But (and this is a bad thing) I’m also a master at multi-tasking. I do one thing on the computer and sort two others in my head at the same time. Yet in order to think properly about important life decisions or future business direction, the conditions in your head have to be absolutely spot-on if you’re to do that really deep thinking that will change the course of history. If you don’t think, you don’t plan and you end up in a place by default, which is generally a compromise and probably a disappointment.

For many people, the car is their space to think. The journey to and from work provides peace and time for ideas to percolate and solutions to pop up to the surface. My own space to think is often limited to the toothbrush moment in the mornings. That fraction of time when the little men in my head, rushing around checking the filing cabinets, come up with the goods after a night of toil on the task I gave them the evening before. I love them and I’ve learned to trust them on really quite big issues. But is two minutes doing justice to the momentousness of some of the decisions I might take as a result of their advice? I don’t think so.

In fact, I can count the life-changing “aha!” moments of my entire life on just 2 hands – they’re etched on my brain. Real insights that moved me onto a new plane because I suddenly saw a clear and inspiring route ahead out of a complex dilemma. Amazing thing, the neuroscience of insights. Apparently our brains give off alpha-waves just before insights, which mean that we’re shutting down inputs from outside and focusing on internal stimuli. Then illumination happens with a rush of adrenaline which creates energy, a positive outlook and a drive to change as new mental connections are made. And gamma waves pop up simultaneously across all parts of the brain as the connections form a sort of super-map to help the change happen. Now that’s what I call a real opportunity for world-class action-planning.

Hardly surprising then, is it, that the conditions have to be just right for this clever process to happen? Back to my point that it’s not just time we need but the right sort of mental space to think creatively if we’re to be masters of our own destiny. So why is it in such short supply?

I guess it could be a function of age and increasing work / home responsibilities. I was better at it when I was younger, albeit that the decisions I took had fewer impacts on other people. I worked in finance and media at a time a few years ago when an employer wasn’t worth considering unless he/she had interviewed you over a long lunch in the Savoy. It was acceptable to be seen to be musing and weighing up your options. In my last job, running a local authority in the UK, I had meetings and tasks in the diary every hour, on the hour. No time even for a coffee with a local businessperson to get an external perspective to inform an important strategic decision, unless I was prepared for later potential allegations of undue influence.

So how do you create that space and make it effective? Clearly, you need to plan the time and the right conditions and sometimes you need help to make it happen. Otherwise, like any big or difficult job, it can seem too complicated to break down into the slices of the famous edible elephant and so too scary to start. How you approach getting the help depends on what you’re hoping to achieve. If you’re lacking personal reflective space, you may need a coach or mentor to really make you focus constructively for short, effective periods of time on the important issues in your work, life or behaviour that you want to address, and help you develop a plan to move yourself forward. If you’re running a business and you’re facing another year without a convincing and distinctive strategy for future success, a dynamic and experienced external facilitator can inspire you and your senior team, equipped with ideas and enthusiasm, to pull that strategy together in a matter of days, with everyone bought-in to making it happen. If you’re struggling to develop new markets or new products, the potential innovations are pretty well all there, hidden in the market intelligence your people carry in their heads. A creative ideas specialist can provide the short-cuts in a single workshop to rip those concepts out into the light of day as options for fast technical and financial evaluation.

Sounds serious? Life is serious. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a lot of fun changing your world, with a little help to create the right space you need to plan effectively. Now who wrote that song about getting by with a little help from your friends?

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Caroline Bull moved to the Isle of Man in March to set up her own consultancy in economic, business and strategy development and is already working with a number of organisations on the island. She’s good at creating space to think… for other people!