How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

SWITCH VIEWS
Here’s another tactic for increasing your chances of finding a new solution:
portray your challenge in a different way, to engage parts of your brain that
haven’t yet been invited to the party. For example, if you’ve been thinking about
a problem in terms of numbers, try describing it visually—or vice versa.
I saw this work well for a group of executives I was working with on a
leadership development course in Norway. As leaders get more senior, they
often report a sense of loneliness that arises from feeling that they have fewer
people they can openly ask for advice and support. The group gathered in
Norway was no different, and we were discussing how they could build a
network of more supportive relationships to sustain them through challenging
times. Most of them had quite fixed ideas of what it meant to improve their
network. They associated it with dull conferences and dutiful drinks. They were
writing lists of people they thought they should contact, and then feeling guilty
about not doing it. It was hard for them to get beyond their negative associations
with the idea of “networking.”
To help them think differently, a McKinsey colleague of mine suggested they
draw visual maps of their existing professional networks, with themselves at the
center and a web of links to people around them. The executives raised an
eyebrow or two at the suggestion, but then gamely settled into the task. The
group sat with large pieces of paper and drew with colored pens for fifteen
minutes, coding the relationships in terms of their quality and proximity. They
drew lines that were thicker for stronger relationships, or dotted lines for weak
ones; they used arrows to show the direction of support being given in each
relationship.
Each person drew a rather different type of map, reflecting his or her own
professional reality. One executive drew herself surrounded very tightly with
lots of people, leaving the outer edge of the page quite blank, which led to an
admission that she felt suffocated rather than supported. Another had split the
page into “colleagues,” on the left, and people “outside the company,” on the

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right. The right-hand side was virtually empty, which sparked a discussion of
how his whole team was stuck in a rut without any new ideas. As they compared
their maps, the tenor and quality of the conversation changed entirely, becoming
far more constructive. Suddenly the discussion wasn’t about transactional
LinkedIn invitations, but about the real issues they wanted to address in their
relationships. As a result, each executive ended up with a useful plan and the
enthusiasm to put it into action.
Time and again, I’ve seen these kinds of useful breakthroughs when people
find novel ways to articulate a challenge they’re working on. Mapping things out
visually, with lines and boxes, can give us a better overview of the whole picture
as well as helping us see new connections in a situation, often highlighting
consequences or shortcuts that weren’t previously obvious. Writing about a
potential solution in longhand—something most of us rarely do these days—can
also encourage new insights. In fact, researchers from Princeton and UCLA
found that students who took handwritten notes performed better when asked
conceptual questions after a lecture than those who typed (often verbatim) notes.
As the students wrote down what struck them, they were already sifting and
interpreting the lecturer’s ideas, connecting them to what they had previously
learned and developing more nuanced insight.
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With that in mind, what can you do to see your challenge from a completely
different angle? Here are some specific things to try: