No thinking time left- help

Today most executives seem to be time-starved. They are constantly reacting to daily events, to fix upon the focusing and fixing of short-term performance. This applies to the top executive down to the most junior. The sheer difficulty of having most, if not all of your colleagues working remotely is making it so much harder. Keeping the business simply going is hard, demanding work. What time is there left to think beyond the present?

How can you keep the engagement, how can you find an environment that is creative, stimulating and allows for innovation? Juggling so many crisis events in different ways is exhausting.

Who is encouraging your pause button to go on as we lose more of those relaxing moments to top up our stimulations, as we all continue to isolate, with our lack of socializing, travelling, being in each others company continues to leaves us so devoid of real human interactions, apart from countless Zoom, Skype, or Team meetings? We need to replace this “void” with better thinking time to re-stimulate our curiosity and logic senses.

It just seems to me they simply don’t have this luxury to think.

Technology is rapidly taking over this thinking role, we increasingly rely on searches to at least begin our thinking. Humans are becoming the 2nd class citizen for thinking.

We are getting increasingly unobservant unless it is coming from the screen in front of us. More of our information is coming to us in predictable and narrow ways, we are being cut off from alternatives.

We are being deluged by social media that constantly become smarter on your clicks to give you the information to help you in your daily lives. We are numbing our own instincts and relying on others. We are losing the world of “personal physical experience”, our own journey of being curious and replacing this with a “junkies” fix of being reliant on others to entertain us.

Sitting back simply becoming increasingly remote observers is not helping us too really think, we often are simply not connecting the dots, we are chasing the moving dots or just moving from one dot to another and never thinking about connecting them up.

We should think more about the gaps, the issues, and most importantly for us, the implications. The more we react and don’t think things through and apply them to our situation, our context, our situation, the more we are more than likely going to foul up somewhere along the way. Equally, the more you fail to project something into a situation you have observed, the more you ignore the opportunity for change or at least challenging a situation.

This time-starved environment has real implications for innovation.

If we don’t sit down and think through issues and implications of our present performance around innovation, how can we close the gaps and improve it? We just simply don’t seem to have a more systematic, connected roadmap within our thinking that points the way to the improving longer-term as we keep doing this ‘reacting’ only.

We have such a limited amount of time to pause, evaluate, or redesign. We equally don’t feel capable to simply assign this over, even to outsiders to help. We are far too challenged and driven, often far to inbreed into thinking “our solutions can only be the only solutions to our problems”.

Often I am caught in finding better solutions to this trap. As an external consultant or advisor, I see a mistake, upon mistake happening. It is not from a lack of trying or a lack of working within the abilities or situation, it is often that lack of alternatives that might be considered. We simply cannot get a different message through, those “in charge” press on regardless.

Tell me, does it really need to be like this?

Often there is no time for thoughtful analysis, a depth of thinking, a platform of knowledge and connectors to bounce this off. Yet there is a growing need to discuss this, the risk of wrongly innovating, of dealing with increased failures all seems to call for solutions to help but where? Where do I quickly go to gain some innovation knowledge or insight, as I simply have no time to sift through it all.

We are losing sight of time, a time where we stop talking, wanting to search for latest events, follow the latest trends, watch something on tik tok or youtube. We need to stop, switch off the distractions and simply learn how to think. To piece different strands of thinking together in new ways and understanding the implications of that. Instead, we push this thinking aside to go back and listen or read about the latest “breaking news”.

If we continue this way, human innovation will be dead in years to come. We will just sit back, explore the artificial intelligence sources we have and never be able to filter out the possible and not possible without the aid of technology as we will have lost our own skills and ability to observe the world, as our experiences get increasingly shut down, to what we are “feed”.

We are often faced with the death of a thousand cuts.

Often that precious lack of dedicated time to investigate, to question, to deepen understanding, simply to relate too and interpret innovation is a key missing ingredient. This is where the external perspective can fill critical gaps; it can become the extra resource, that runs in parallel.

I believe it is the time where the value of external, dedicated innovation thinking has a place within the time-starved innovators thinking, it might help provide more comprehensive delivery of innovation understanding and plugging individual gaps by delivering thinking that bridges many of those current gaps I seem to find. This comes from building up our own experiences, learning from our own failures and getting knocked back and most of all our abilities to create, build and influence others with innovations that are different, creative and have a positive impact on what we have.

Is there space for an “innovation thinking guru?” I believe so, do you? If so…………hello, invest some of your time in (quality) thinking time?

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