How To Think Better At Work: Chris Thomason (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of Chris Thomason’s talk titled “How To Think Better At Work” at TEDxReigate 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Upgrading Your Brain’s Operating System

We update the apps on our phone. We update the antivirus protection automatically. We upgrade the operating system. But how often do we upgrade our brain operating system? How often do we spend time thinking about our thinking? Because we all think all the time, even when we sleep in our dreams. For the next few minutes, I’d like to offer you a brain operating system upgrade, a freaky thinking upgrade. Something that will positively disrupt the way you think from this moment on.

To start, I want you to think, where are you when you do your best thinking? What are you doing? I’ve asked this question widely across the UK’s largest bank. And the answers I get most often are in the shower, walking the dog, exercising at the gym or driving in the car.

Rarely does anybody say they get the best ideas at work. And nobody has yet to say to me they get the best ideas in a brainstorming session. While this may seem quite surprising, what is surprising is the truth behind why this is.

The Science Behind Creative Thinking

In 2012, the University of California performed some research and they used some unusual thinking techniques, unusual uses techniques where people have to come up with ideas for an everyday item in a two-minute period. They’ve got to try and find as many unusual uses for, say, a toothpick or a rubber band or a paper clip.

They ran the test for two minutes and then they ran the test again for another two minutes. But they split the 145 participants into four groups. One group, they didn’t give any break at all between the two tests. Do the first test, then do the test again. The other three groups, they gave a 12-minute break between the two tests.

One group was told to sit there and relax. Do nothing for 12 minutes. Another group was told to watch a monitor where numbers would flash up and they had to say whether the preceding number had been odd or even. That was deemed to be a demanding task.

And the final group had to again watch a monitor when numbers flashed up. But they had to say whether the number currently on the screen was odd or even. And that was deemed to be an undemanding task. The researchers then compared the performance between the first and the second test.

The Surprising Results

Well, the group that had no gap between the tests fared really badly in the second test compared to the first one. The group that just sat there and relaxed, they did marginally worse on the second test. The group that had the demanding task, they did marginally better on the second test.

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But the group that had the undemanding task, they did over 40% better on the second test. Way ahead of the others. Now if you think where you are when you get your best ideas, you do your best thinking. If you’re in the shower, that’s an undemanding task.

If you’re walking the dog, if you’re exercising. And if you’re driving the car, if you’re driving down a nearly empty motorway or you’re cruising along a winding country road, that’s probably quite conducive to good thinking. But be in the center of a city where you’ve got bus lanes and no entry signs and traffic lights and pedestrians and cyclists and other cars. It takes all your attention just to drive, never mind think.

So it seems that to do good thinking, we should also be doing some kind of undemanding task at the same time. And if that’s where we do our best thinking, then we actually do our best thinking in that time. So maybe you should save your important issues for those times.

The History of Brainstorming

In 1953, advertising executive Alex Osborne wrote a book called “Applied Imagination.” In the book, there was quite an extensive process, how to work with clients to develop new ideas. And within this extensive process, there’s one little tool that he called “Brainstorming.” Now, the rest of the process seems to fall into disuse, but what has stayed with us is brainstorming.

Whenever we seem to need some new ideas, what do we do? We do some brainstorming. Over time, academics have liked to study brainstorming to compare the ways we think. Now, a few years ago, Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, did a meta-analysis on brainstorming.

Now, a meta-analysis is where you do a study of all the studies that have been done before. He had to look at several hundred studies. His conclusion was that decades of research on brainstorming has conclusively shown that brainstorming groups think of fewer ideas than do the individuals who think alone and later pool their ideas.

So the question is, why are we using brainstorming if it doesn’t work? I’m sure you use this tool in your workplace. It’s over 70 years old and we use it when we actually have a need to overcome a major problem or to develop a new opportunity. Which other tools in your business or your workplace do you use for important things that are over 70 years old? I don’t think very many, but potentially it’s because we don’t know of any alternatives.

Understanding Different Types of Thinking

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote the book “Thinking Fast and Slow.” In the book, he proposes two generic types of thinking, System 1 and System 2. System 1 is fast, responsive, reactive. Who? Bing, King Charles I. When? Bing, 1632. Where? Bing, on a boat on the English Channel. Really good for quiz shows, really good for the pub quiz. But the workplace is neither of these. It’s not about speed in answering in the workplace.

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System 2 thinking is different.

It’s more thoughtful, more considered, more reflective in nature. It’s not about coming up with the answer. It’s about coming up with an answer, and then another answer, and then yet another answer. Always looking for that better answer that provides a better solution to the issue that you’re considering.

The Vampire Analogy

Let me deviate for a moment. I’d just like to talk to you about vampires. You may be aware that vampires generally live in castles in Transylvania, only coming out in the evening to howl at the full moon. But actually, there’s something else about vampires that you may not know, a little known fact, that vampires don’t see a reflection in a mirror.

If I was with my best buddy, who’s a vampire, we could take a selfie of ourselves. But if we happen to be standing inside in front of a big mirror, what I could do is take a photograph of ourselves, the reflection in the mirror. This is what the photograph would look like. You wouldn’t see my buddy. He’s no reflection.

Now, over the centuries, the vampires have changed their ways. They’ve adapted. They now live in our cities and in our towns. They walk along the high streets with us. They’ve learned to hide their characteristics that gave them away in the past. There is only one place that a vampire will show their true colors, and that is in workplace meetings.

Because when somebody asks an important question that needs some deep thinking, they will not reflect. They will answer straight away. They are System 1 responders to a System 2 question. I’m sure you’ve seen it. Something difficult, but it’s how quickly can you get your answer in there. They are the vampires. That’s what I call vampire thinking. And it’s probably quite prevalent in your workplace.

Now, a disclaimer here. You’ve got to be careful. It isn’t politically correct to drive a stake through somebody’s heart in a meeting. There is an alternative approach. You can use this symbol. But if you pose an important question that requires a bit of thinking, when you pose it, just say, “Would you all mind just taking ten seconds of silence to think about it before you speak?”

Because those vampire thinkers, the System 1 thinkers, they’ll come up with the idea straight away, but they’ll hold it back because you’ve told them not to speak. And they’ll come up with a second idea. And then they’ll come up with an even better third idea. By holding them back, you’ve converted them from System 1 thinkers into System 2 thinkers. So try this technique. Ask for ten seconds of silence in meetings.

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Alternative Approaches to Meetings

But what else can you do? If brainstorming doesn’t work in meetings and you’ve got to hold regular meetings, are there any alternative approaches? A lot of our meetings have a regular cadence. They are weekly, two-weekly, monthly.

An alternate approach is to use something called proactive procrastination. Wait, isn’t that a paradox? How can you proactively put something off? Well, rather than say, in the next meeting, we’re going to do a brainstorming session on this topic. Now, we all know that brainstormings aren’t the best place to do our thinking. And we also know that we do our best thinking in our own special spaces.

Rather than say, that’s what’s going to happen. At the end of one meeting, you can simply say, “This is the important question that we want to consider. Now, I’d like you all to think about this in the space until the next meeting.” Because during that time, a lot of us are actually doing hybrid working at the moment. We have time at home. Why not take half an hour off of that time and take your dog for a walk and take your issue with you?

Take yourself for a walk, just take your issue for a walk. Because you know that might be where you do your best thinking. If it’s an important issue, it’s worthy of your valuable thinking time. So know where and when your best time is. And take your issue into that time.

And then at the start of the next meeting, you can just give your best ideas. You’re not doing the actual thinking there. You’re just presenting the ideas where you can discuss them and actually build on them and develop them into something tangible for you to deliver.

Conclusion

This brings us to the end of our brain operating system upgrade. And if you adopt and embrace some of these opportunities for your thinking, you’ll find you’re able to address bigger, bolder questions and to answer them in a better way. In a way that will disrupt your normal thinking to change the world around you for yourself, but also for the world of those around you as well.

So this is the end of our freaky thinking upgrade. We must now exit the application. I just hope that from this day on, your thinking is never the same again. Thank you.