Hi guys and welcome back to Brain-Friendly Thinking!
If you want to dive deep into a topic or a problem, you need to take in a lot of information.
But, information is just that: information.
In order to utilise what you read and to develop original thoughts you need to process that
information; sort it, structure it, and link it to other knowledge you already possess.
Today I gonna show you how brain-friendly tools can help you with that, using the example
of a book I recently read.
The book which I’m post-processing is called “Next Practice” by Peter Kruse.
It’s a book about complexity and especially how companies can adapt to change in a world
that becomes more and more complex.
Unfortunately, as far as I know at least, this book hasn’t been translated to English
yet.
Which is a real shame, because you can learn a lot about complex systems from that book.
It’s a very good introductory text.
As I was reading this book, I created an ABC-active, as I usually do when reading.
And I have already done several videos where I show the process, so I will not go into
any details here.
If you’re interested, you can click the video here.
But when I finished reading the book, all I had was a list of keywords more or less
alphabetically sorted.
And for some of the keywords I immediately knew why I had written them down.
And other keywords I had to do a bit more thinking before I could remember.
So now I wanted to take the information from the book and I wanted to transform it specifically
into zettels that I could store in my zettelkasten.
Because you might be actually tempted to take over as much information as possible, but
that just leads to information overload.
Rather, limitation is the key.
Only take over what is really essential.
Only take over what really enriches and contributes to your trains of thoughts and to the ideas
you already had before.
Or what starts a complete new train of thought.
But as I was processing that information, there were always these three leading questions
in my mind.
What is important?
How are the ideas linked together?
And how can I concentrate this into a zettel?
So, now I finished reading the book, and this is where we start.
So, I finished reading the book.
I got my ABC-active here, filled to the brim with concepts and with names.
And now I go and I group these words into different categories.
So let’s see, what have we got?
Erm…
One of the things that was very important in the book was Best Practice.
Best Practice vs Next Practice.
So I go through the words I collected for the first time.
Now, for a lot of words I might not remember what they mean straight away.
But there’re some for which I do remember.
That’s where I start.
I start putting them into categories.
For the others, I go over them again and again.
And for most of them, at some point, I will remember.
First vaguely, then more and more strongly.
And so over time more and more words will end up in one category or the other.
And at the same time it’s a very good way of retrieving the words and of remembering
why I wrote them down.
Because in order to put them into a category, you really need to understand what they mean
and why you wrote them down.
Next I take the words from the ABC-list which I just categorised and I take my time to rewrite
that into new lists according to which category I placed the word into.
So I have one new list for each category.
This might seem a little bit pointless and like a waste of time.
However, if you’re careful about this, if you’re really doing that actively, I found
that it really helps you to think through the text on a much deeper level.
And you again retrieve what you have done before.
And as I’m doing it, I sometimes find that my first categorisation was wrong and I now
put the word into a different category where it much rather belongs to.
Or sometimes I take a word and I put it into both categories.
And as I’m doing this, I sometimes get completely new ideas that I then write down by themselves.
And then I continue with the lists.
It’s very strange, you wouldn’t think that this should be the case, but it is really
an active working process.
After having processed the content of the book in this way, I wanted to make a summary
of the most important argument.
And for that I decided to make a CaWa.
One of the important things of a CaWa is to decide on a separate word where all the other
words branch off from.
And in this case it really wasn’t easy.
I thought about several possibilities and finally I settled on Instability.
According to the author, instability will increase because globally things are more
and more interconnected with one another.
A higher interconnection density also means a larger speed of change.
And that requires next practice which is one of the central concepts of the book.
But once I had down next nractice, I immediately felt the urge to also put in best practice
which is the other important concept and the opposite of next practice.
Best practice is what you want to do if you have stability.
So my central word was instability, but then I said: “when stability then best practice”…
and… that somehow didn’t really fit.
So, I put the CaWa away and I started a new CaWa.
And after a little bit more mulling over, I decided to use Dynamics instead of Instability.
Once I decided on Dynamics, things started to fall into place.
Phase transition requires next practice.
Structure exploitation requires best practice.
And there needs to be a strategic balance between the two.
The dynamics is driven by the interconnection density which increases.
That leads to a higher speed of change.
And it also leads to an increased probability that the changes will be avalanches.
The changes are driven by circular causality.
And next practice means adapting to a new reality.
That requires an iterative approach to explore the new search space and emotion management.
And so my CaWa is able to capture all of the central concepts of the book and put them
into relation to one another.
Now as I processed the content of the book in this way, I was always on the lookout for
what are the important concepts?
And, how can I group them in order to write my zettels?
After having them processed in several different ways by now, there were certain things I was
already certain that I wanted to create a zettel about that.
There were other concepts I sort of knew I wanted to write a zettel about, but I was
not quite sure yet, what I should put into the zettel.
So, in order to get a better understanding of what the zettel should contain, I went
back to categorising.
This time not all of the lists from my ABC-active, but I went to specific lists and focussed
on those.
For some of them I actually went through and categorised all the words.
For some other lists I only went and I marked the most important words.
Doing all this processing gave me an idea which I could not clearly see before.
One of the central aspects of the book is that we’re living in a world that is more
and more interconnected.
There’re certain developments that lead towards that.
Now that we are connected, there’re certain dynamics that come from that.
And there’re certain consequences of this development.
For each of the three aspects, development, dynamics and consequences, I went through
my previous lists and I selected those concepts that are most critical to these aspects.
At first, again, that was not quite so easy.
But after going back and forth a couple of time between the lists, the whole idea became
clearer and clearer in my mind.
But reading through the lists now, they make the ideas I had before much more concrete,
much more specific.
And, therefore, it’s now much easier for me to talk about the idea and to put it into
words.
What these thinking tools allow us to do is to find the essentials of a text or an idea
and how the different parts interact with one another.
This understanding is important if you want to write good zettels.
So, now I pivoted from exploring the text with lists and categorisation and CaWas to
actually writing the zettels themselves.
But by this time I had a plan in my mind what information was worth taking over into my
zettelkasten.
Now, at first I was writing digital zettels and I tried to follow the principle of atomicity
and everything.
Here you can see, for instance, the zettel which I wrote for Next Practice.
I said: “Next practice is the conscious management of phase transitions within an
organisation.
This is a period of uncertainty, instability and reduced performance.
See critical slowing down.
Since the correct path is not knowable, it requires active exploration and frequent changes
of how things are done.
Requires strategic balance with best practice.”
You see, there’re also certain concepts which I discuss in other zettels, so I linked
to them.
Phase transition or best practice.
I wrote this zettel in December 2021.
Now it’s April 2022.
And in the meantime there has been a big change in the way I’m doing zettelkasten.
Mainly, I switched from a digital system to an analogue system.
Why I did this and why I think that’s better is a topic for another video, so let’s not
dwell on how I did things back then, but see how am I doing things now?
So, this is my zettelkasten.
It’s got two sections, plus the index here in the back.
The first section is about systems.
The second section is about thinking.
Actually, the zettels from the book, they’re spanning both sections.
Now first I need to go to systems control, one point four.
And here we got the first zettel: management of instability.
This zettel is actually a summary of the main argument of the book.
It reads: “Over the past couple of decades the global interconnection density has increased
greatly.
In the resulting network any change introduced can ripple far and also loop back to feed
back onto the element that caused the change in the first place.
This results in a non-linear system where the speed of change is increased and the magnitude
of changes has avalanche potential.
Whenever such a fundamental change has occurred, any company affected by the change needs to
adapt its internal structure to survive and thrive.
To do so successfully requires a strategic balance between two fundamental management
strategies: best practice and next practice.”
And you can actually see that “survive and thrive” has got a little a here which is
a link to another card.
And also one and two, in this little list here, they’re also links to other cards.
And if I flip through, then here we got Best Practice: “Best practice optimises functions
in stable states.”
And behind that I have Next Practice: “Next practice changes functions during phase transitions.”
And for each of them I say what they actually are.
And you can see “survive and thrive” has a little superscript a here which links to
another card.
In this case the card that is right behind it: “Possible ways for companies to adapt
to dynamic markets.”
This is actually not something from the book itself, these are just some ideas I got from
processing all the information.
And I filed it here.
That means that I enriched this first thought now.
If I go further, I have here “Next practice changes functions during phase transition.”
Another thought from the book also relates to that and that is: “Emotional management
important component of change management.”
So, usually when we think about change management or changes we usually think about technological
aspect or structural aspect, but Kruse makes the important point that any type of change
is always accompanied by emotions.
So, I filed it as a separate zettel which actually belongs to Next Practice.
And then…
This is actually from the book.
But you see, after the Emotional Management something interesting happened.
Because soon after I listened to a talk where some people talked about how ABC-lists can
be used for emotional management.
And then I though…
It was very interesting, so I wrote it down.
In which way can it be used?
This is basically from the talk.
But I thought, well that fits quite well with what Kruse says about emotional management.
This is sort of: how can it be done practically?
So, I filed this thought, these ideas which I got from the talk after the ideas from the
book.
And then, as I was reading through another book, “How to solve it” by George Polya,
he also talks about emotional management, even though he doesn’t call it emotional
management.
But he says, when we’re solving problems emotions are very important.
So, to keep going, we need a lot emotional management.
He talks about this from the point of view of a teacher, but again I thought this is
actually something that is very closely related to this emotional management that Kruse talks
about.
So, I also filed it here.
And then, just a couple of days ago actually, when listening again to a small documentary
about Feynman from 1973…
In there Richard Feynman and Fred Hoyle among other things they discuss how it is to discover
new things, how to solve problems in science.
And they made a very interesting point: It is the hope to suddenly being able to see
the solution and the excitement that comes with it, the hope for the excitement that
keeps the scientist going.
Which in itself is a very beautiful illustration of what Polya talks about in his book and
why he mentions emotional management in the context of solving problems.
So, I filed it behind emotional management in problem solving which again is filed under
emotional management in change management.
Going back to our first zettel, right down here you see a see-also note.
This is a long distance link.
So, this long distance link actually goes to section two of my zettelkasten which is
thinking.
Two point five… erm… two point one slash five.
Two is thinking and one… two point one is innovation.
Here I got a lot of zettels.
Two point one slash four… two point one slash…
four…
five.
There we go.
And this one links to the concept of future readiness: “Future readiness needs to be
actively acquired.”
This is not a thought by Kruse, this is a thought by Vera F. Birkenbihl which she talks
about in her book “Birkenbihl on management”.
And she says: “Advances in development are accompanied by phases of instability.”
That’s actually also something that Kruse talks about.
So, Kruse talks about that if the circumstances are changing we need to switch from best practice
to next practice.
This is very related.
Even though she didn’t know Kruse and I’m pretty sure Kruse didn’t know Birkenbihl.
This little train of thought here, which might grow in the future, goes very well together
with the train of thought that Kruse started, so I linked them together.
And there you see.
Even though this is still quite a small zettelkasten, but already you see how different ideas start
to be interlinked.
And so you see how the information from the book ended up in my zettelkasten.
There were a couple of other zettels which I wrote, some of them not as richly connected
as the ones which I showed to you.
However, I think you get the gist of what I am doing.
The important thing is, if you read the book and think through it and develop the zettels,
you might end up with different zettels than me.
Or even if you end up taking over some of the same information that I did, you will
write about this in a completely different way and you will connect it in a completely
different way.
That’s fine.
That’s how it should be.
Because these are your thought processes, these are your ideas which you are enriching,
and since you are different from me, so too your results will differ from mine.
This is absolutely natural and it actually shows that real thinking has taken place.
If you just take what you read in the book and you copy it one to one to your zettelkasten,
that’s not thinking.
You don’t want to do this, because… well, then…
what is the point taking it over.
It’s already there in the book.
You can always go back and reread it.
No, you want to think it and you want to enrich your thoughts or start new trains of thought.
Of course these are not the only thinking tools there are.
There are many more that you can use and some thinking tools will be more useful in certain
contexts or for certain types of information than others.
I already made another video where I post-processed the information I gained from a book, although
that was more open ended, that was not with the aim of taking information and installing
it in a zettelkasten.
However, if you want to get more ideas of what you can do to post-process a book, you
can watch the video here.
Or if you want to get an overview about all of the thinking techniques and many more that
you can use, you can watch the playlist right here.
Otherwise, if you found this video useful, please don’t forget to give the like button
a high five.
Consider subscribing, if you haven’t already.
And until next time: keep thinking!