Strategy – Page 8 – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

Nature as Coach: The 4.5-Billion-Year-Old Leadership Expert Right Outside Your Window

July 28, 2025/0 Comments/in Balanced Lifestyle, Books, Business Toolkit, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Nature offers 4.5 billion years of leadership wisdom. Learn regenerative principles from forests, oceans & ecosystems to build resilient organizations.

Today’s post is by Dr. Kathleen Allen, author of Leading from the Roots: Nature-inspired Leadership Lessons for Today’s World.

What if the best leadership coach wasn’t found in an office or consulting firm, but in the world outside? What if a mentor with 4.5 billion years of experience in regenerative systems were available to you now?

Since life began, Nature has been running the ultimate leadership laboratory. Every ecosystem, from our forests to our oceans, has survived and thrived using regenerative principles that business schools are just beginning to pay attention to. Yet in my four decades of management consulting experience, I know that leaders who view their organizations as “living systems” have consistently created the most resilient, successful businesses.

Nature has always been an excellent model, mentor and muse for leaders, and perhaps even more so today. It’s the foundation for the regenerative leadership movement, and I’ve spent my entire career helping leaders incorporate lessons from Nature to create more successful teams and organizations.

What is regenerative leadership?

Regenerative leaders work with the energy and potential in a system, rather than trying to force it in a specific direction. They know growth doesn’t come from control, but from trust and alignment with Nature’s principles. Regenerative organizations have a strong focus on resilience and long-term goals that support the organization, the planet, and many generations to come.

Charles Darwin is often misquoted as saying “survival of the fittest,” but what he really said goes to the heart of Nature-based, regenerative leadership practices:

“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most able to adapt to change.”

This subject is too complex to explain fully here, but I’ll try to give you some of the points that seem to resonate most with my clients and others I reach through my books and speaking engagements. Here goes!

Generosity as a growth strategy

Picture yourself walking through an old-growth forest. Beneath your feet lies one of Nature’s most sophisticated coaching models, the mycelium network. This underground web of fungi connects trees in a system many scientists call the “wood wide web.” Here, mature trees share nutrients with seedlings, send chemical warnings about pest attacks, and redirect resources to support struggling community members.

If Nature were coaching you on organizational leadership, this would be the first lesson. True strength comes not from individual performance, but from the health of the entire system. The largest trees in the forest aren’t hoarding resources. They’re the most generous, understanding that their survival depends on the thriving of the whole community.

A focus on the cycle, not the clock

If Nature could review your leadership strategy, it might wonder why so many organizations chase constant growth. It’s as if spring were the only season worth repeating. But Nature follows a deeper wisdom, what scientists call the adaptive cycle. This pattern includes growth, conservation, release, and renewal. It’s a constant feedback loop that creates all the necessary phases for resilience and sustained success.

In this cycle change is not a disruption but a vital phase. After periods of growth and holding on, Nature lets go. Structures break down, making room for renewal. People and teams need the same. Burnout is often the result of never pausing. Sustainability comes from aligning with the rhythms that truly support life, professionally and personally.

Nature’s model for interdependence

Traditional management practices view interdependence as merely task based. But as organizational consultant Ranjay Gulati wrote in a 2020 Harvard Business Review article:

“As organizations face increasingly unpredictable workstreams and workers co-design the organization alongside managers, our field requires a more comprehensive toolbox that incorporates aspects of agent-based interdependence.”

The ocean offers a profound model of interdependence. Beneath its surface lies a vast, living web of relationships. Currents circulate nutrients across thousands of miles, coral reefs act as cooperative neighborhoods, and even the smallest organisms influence the entire system. Each ecosystem functions through mutual responsiveness, constant feedback, and shared survival. This is the kind of energy we need to cultivate in our organizations.

Even predator-prey relationships in the ocean demonstrate this interdependence. Predators regulate populations, while prey species often drive migration patterns and influence ecosystem behavior.

These dynamics reflect balance, not domination. Regenerative leaders know that power circulates, adapts, and evolves through feedback and relationship, just as it does in the sea. Successful businesses today demonstrate that real strength comes not from command-and-control structures, but from relationships rooted in trust, reciprocity, and shared purpose.

Softness as a strategic advantage

Billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban said recently that three soft skills, curiosity, agility and adaptability, are key to thriving in any era. This is also true for organizations.

Nature’s coaching on softness challenges everything we’ve been taught about leadership strength. The most adaptable organisms aren’t the hardest, they’re the most flexible.

Nature teaches us to create conditions in which change flows naturally, rather than driving it by force. Consequently, resistance becomes information rather than opposition, and flexibility becomes a major competitive advantage.

Monocultures create fragility so in Nature’s coaching model, diversity is a survival strategy. Diversity among teams cultivates different ways of thinking, and of solving problems. Oceans don’t thrive because they have different species. The different species represent a diverse set of roles, perspectives, and approaches to success. We need that paradigm now more than ever in our organizations.

Humans and Nature

We can forget humans are a species within Nature. We’ve evolved within its systems, not outside of them. We perform at our best when following the rhythms that have sustained our planet for thousands of years. When we look for guidance in times of great complexity, change, and uncertainty, what better coach than the most time-tested, adaptive, resilient system of them all?

The question isn’t whether Nature has wisdom to offer our leadership practices. It’s whether we’re ready to listen.

Thought leader, author and trusted advisor, Dr. Kathleen Allen helps organizations and executives create meaningful change using Nature as a model for more effective leadership practices. More at kathleenallen.net

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Do You Set Stretch Goals?

July 23, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

A commit goal gives your team a clear target to aim for, while a stretch goal gives your team an incentive to go above and beyond.

A goal setting technique designed to provide predictability and generate excitement and upside potential is setting commit and stretch goals. The commit goal is a promise of what will be delivered. It’s non-negotiable. Missing it has big consequences. The stretch goal is something for the team to aspire to. If they reach it, the rewards can be really large.

Let me walk through an example of what this can look like. Let’s say we have a corporate profit target of $150 million. Each business unit is given a portion of that target. And when you add those up, it’s $155 million because we want to have a hedge in this situation. Those are commit numbers. One business unit has a $40 million commit and a $45 million stretch. Let’s say at the end of the year they come in at $41 million. Well, they get 20% of the extra bonus that’s available because they got one million of the five million possible.

Let’s say another business unit had a goal of $50 million as their commit. They come in at 45 million. It’s a bad year. No bonuses and poor reviews are going to follow in the performance management process. Another business unit has a $27 million commit and a $30 million stretch. They come in at $32 million through some really good luck and a lot of hard work. That team should get 166% of the possible bonus if it’s an uncapped bonus structure.

The final business unit has a commit of $38 million and a stretch of 45 million. They come in at 40 million and they get a 28% of the available bonus. The corporate result of this entire goal-setting structure is coming in at $158 million on a corporate commit of 155 from this business unit.

When you look at setting these commits and these stretches, it’s pretty clear that the team knows what they have to hit with the commit. They understand what the consequences are. Having the stretch gives them that incentive to work even harder and deliver above and beyond.

One thing I invite you to do is to create a commit and a stretch for all major metrics for your organization. Ensure there are consequences for missing the commit. Make sure there are rewards commensurate with hitting the stretch. By laying out these goals and letting people know broadly across the organization what the commit and stretch are, as well as the consequences and rewards, you can drive exactly the behaviors you want to hit your higher level goals.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

The 16th Century Word That Gives You a Strategic Advantage

July 21, 2025/0 Comments/in Books, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

By changing the way you approach stakeholder interests, you can drive better performance. Instead of using a sequential and conflict-driven approach, you can take a different tack that promotes harmony and collaboration.

Today’s post is by Nancy Falls, author of Corporate Concinnity in the Boardroom: 10 Imperatives To Drive High Performing Companies.

The year was 1531. It was the beginning of what is known as the Age of Discovery. Humans were busy mapping the world, constructing the first rudimentary watch, building empires in Persia, China and the new world. They build St. Peter’s in Rome, the first music conservatories and made discoveries in medicine, economics and astronomy. They brought potatoes from the new world to Europe. They started transatlantic slave trade, only to denounce it 50 years later. Machiavelli declared that the ends justify the means in The Prince. And just 13 years after that someone decided he was wrong and invented a word communicating the opposite thesis, that how things are done matters very much. That word was concinnity. The year was 1531.

If you are like most English speakers you probably don’t know this word. You should learn it.

Concinnity is the skillful and harmonious fitting together of the parts of something.

Many see the word and think consensus, which must be its grammatical first cousin. I look at the word and see lots of curves and circles. It just looks like unity to me.

And the word offers a breakthrough way to look at organizational leadership and governance.

Define Your Supporting Goals

July 16, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Take a big goal for your department or your business unit and think about the support teams that contribute to hitting that goal.

It’s easy to focus on big departmental goals, but not everyone on the team can directly affect those numbers. Setting goals for supporting functions helps link people’s roles and the work they do every day to that broader departmental goal.

To do this, it requires you to break those big goals down into component parts. Assess which supporting activities make that big goal possible. With those activities identified, you can proceed to set goals for those supporting groups. That will help them drive departmental alignment around that bigger goal.

For example, I know one organization that was trying to reduce their costs by $100 million over a two-year period. Now, not everyone in the organization owned a budget, and they were asking, “How can I contribute to hitting that big number?” Everyone in the organization had to contribute something. They looked at those supporting functions and tried to understand what activities does that function do that drives that higher-level cost number?

The supply chain group understood that if they increased their inventory turns and improved their truck fill rate, it would make their operation more efficient, which would then allow the broader organization to take some costs out. The manufacturing team looked at their processes, and they understood that if they cut the line changeover time, it would make their process more efficient, again, contributing to reducing costs. The real estate team even chipped in. They looked at space utilization, and they deferred some new expenses to future years. Every group had a smart goal that linked their work to that higher-level $100 million cost reduction goal.

Something I encourage you to do is to take a big goal for your department or your business unit and think about the support teams that contribute to hitting that goal. Build out a process map and understand how the support teams’ work impacts that big number. Then be sure that their individual and team goals are tied to those drivers of hitting your larger goal.

When you pull everybody together and understand how they contribute, then make it clear to them how their goals drive that business unit goal, you’re going to get more alignment and excitement around the work they do and hopefully help you hit that goal more easily.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

How to Set Goals That Go Beyond the Numbers

July 2, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

There are two major types of goals you can set for your business unit: quantitative and qualitative goals.

When you set goals, there are commonly two types: quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative Goals

When you set goals that are quantitative, they’re going to focus on things like financial results, operational metrics, customer dynamics, or quality. You can typically track these types of goals pretty easily. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to be thoughtful about these metrics. A focused set of critical driver metrics is more valuable than a broad set of less relevant metrics that your team can’t affect.

Let me share an example. Let’s imagine you have a sales team. The overall goal for the division is to grow revenue. The driver metrics that affect revenue are price and volume. Now, we’re talking about the sales team here. They have no control over product price. If you just give this team a revenue goal for their business unit, it won’t focus their efforts appropriately. It could lead them to argue or complain about pricing policy. That’s just not productive. The business unit also doesn’t control customer service. Using total revenue for this team’s goal isn’t fair because they don’t control all of it.

When you go to set the sales team’s goal, focus their goals on what they can control. In this case, it’s new sales volume. Think about that sales team going out and trying to get more customers. The driver metrics, for their ability to acquire customers, are things like the number of prospects they talk to, the number of sales calls they conduct, and the conversion rate from a prospect to a paying customer. By focusing on these driver metrics for this sales team and focusing it on what they can control, you’re going to get better results.

When you think through your metrics for your business unit, think through the drivers. Consider the team’s ability to control those drivers. And make sure the goals you allocate to them are only focused on that which they can control. If you build your goals this way, you’re going to get a more concrete set of goals that your team feels empowered to actually drive.

Qualitative Goals

In addition to setting quantitative goals, which are pretty easy to set, a lot of times you’ll have to set qualitative goals. You can look at things like major project completion or milestones in completing that project. Sometimes, you want to measure things that are difficult to measure. You’ll have to infer from indirect quantitative metrics whether you’re making progress on that desired outcome. Things like culture are hard to measure, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to measure it. You can construct a set of indicators that let you know if you’re moving culture in the right direction. You can look at things that’ll tell you if you’re succeeding in reaching that higher-level end goal.

Let me offer a couple of examples. If we’re looking at culture, maybe we create a balance scorecard to measure our performance on cultural improvement. We want to be a top place to work. We want engaged associates. That’s hard to measure. But, we can look at quantitative metrics to tell us how we’re doing. We can look at associate retention, how many people stay in the organization. There are measures out there like a Gallup Q12 poll that can tell you which direction your culture is moving. You can look at things like absenteeism. I can measure if somebody’s not at work, and that’ll tell me if I have a good culture or a bad one. I can look at referral hires. Are people telling their friends, “Hey, you should come work here—it’s a great place to work?” Some organizations have kudos programs where associates reward one another for doing something great. How many people are using that program?

When I look at all of these quantitative metrics together, it gives me an indicator on whether my culture is strong or weak and if it’s going in the right direction. You may have situations where you’re doing a big project. And again, qualitative goals can matter here. Let’s look at implementing a large technology system. We may take an approach where we set goals based on milestones. We may set goals around use case completion, user acceptance testing, and training completion. Setting qualitative metrics is the same as setting quantitative ones. Understand the desired high-level outcome you’re trying to achieve. Think of drivers that point toward that outcome. For the ERP it’s things like “Are you hitting your milestones to get the project done?” For things like culture, maybe it’s several indicators that you tie together and say, “Does this picture tell me I’m going in the right direction?”

Qualitative goals can really help you understand how your organization is doing. Pay as much attention to them as you do to your quantitative goals.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

How to Figure Out Where You Should Focus

June 30, 2025/0 Comments/in Books, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

True business leaders stay focused. This is crystal clear. But how can you make sure you are focusing on the most promising business opportunities that can lead your company to success?

Today’s post is by Sharon Tal, co-author of Where to Play.

In their best-selling book Creativity Inc., Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace present well known pieces of advice that lead you nowhere. One of them is “focus, focus, focus!” As they explain: “When people hear it, they nod their heads as if a great truth has been presented, not realizing that they have been diverted from addressing the far harder problem: deciding what is it that they should be focusing on. There is nothing in this piece of advice that gives you any idea how to figure out where the focus should be.”

Indeed, knowing that you need to focus is the easy part, but choosing which opportunities to focus on is a hard nut to crack. This is true for founders of a small startup, just as it is for managers of a large organization. In any case you will need to assess and prioritize your business opportunities to figure out what horse you are betting on.

Here are few tips that will help you to evaluate and compare your business opportunities in a systematic manner, so you can set your strategic focus more easily.

Spotlight on two key factors

Theories on motivation stress that a great goal should be desirable and feasible – both at the same time. A business opportunity is just the same: it should be highly desirable, i.e., offer a high potential for value creation, yet also highly feasible, i.e., bear limited challenges in capturing this value. So when you assess different opportunities for your company, make sure to evaluate these two key factors. Your aim is to focus on a high potential, low challenge opportunity.

Categorize your options

If you systematically evaluate the potential and the challenge of each business opportunity on your table, you can use it to categorize your options into 4 different types:

5 SMART Goal-Setting Principles

June 18, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

When you’re setting your business unit or department goals, take the time to think through every goal to make sure they’re SMART.

When you go to set your business unit goals, there are a few principles you should follow. Any goals you set should be smart. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, these principles improve the team’s understanding of what they need to deliver. They’ll help you ensure you’re able to track performance against the achievement of the goal and gain the team’s commitment to achieving it. There are multiple versions of smart, but they all get to the same thing, creating clear and actionable goals that matter.

Specific

Specific gets to spelling out the behavior or outcome that you desire, it lets people know what to focus on and what actions are expected.

Measurable

As far as being measurable, if you can’t measure it, you don’t know if you succeeded. It also ensures you’re driving the right outcome. Like profits versus sales, because you’ll get very different behaviors depending on how you measure.

Achievable

The goal should be achievable. If it’s not realistic, people are going to give up and not even try. They’ll get halfway through the year and say, “We’re off course so you know what, forget it.”

Relevant

The goal needs to be relevant. It drives the activity that’s tied to a broader organizational goal. If I set a cost-cutting goal for the company but we’re trying to grow sales, that cost-cutting goal is going to be not relevant or helpful to achieving the broader goal of hitting sales.

Time-bound

Your goal should also be time-bound. People need a sense of urgency. Specifying time also enables better work and better project planning.

I worked in an organization where we were trying to increase the number of dollars that we were getting back from consumers who owed us money. The goal was specific. We said, “Here is the metric that matters. We need to achieve 100 million dollars of incremental dollars collected.” It was measurable. We knew exactly what data to get and how we would track it. The 100 million dollars was achievable. Sure it was a big number, but we looked at last year and we said we think we can hit 100 million this year. That goal was absolutely relevant. One of the bigger goals for the company was driving down our losses. It was really dependent upon bringing in these incremental dollars collected. And it was time-bound. We said, “By December 31st, we need to collect these incremental 100 million dollars.” By setting that smart goal, everyone in the organization knew exactly where we were going and why it mattered.

When you’re setting your business unit or department goals, take that time to think through every goal and make sure that those goals are smart.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

4 Common Pitfalls When Solving Problems

June 11, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Use these critical thinking tools to avoid four common pitfalls you can fall into when solving problems.

During your critical thinking processes, there are several pitfalls you might fall into, but you can avoid them:

Jumping to answers too quickly

The most common pitfall is jumping to answers too quickly. You think you know what the problem is and you rush off to solve it. Some of the tools you can use to avoid that pitfall are first, defining your problem well, having that clear problem statement. Why is your stakeholder asking you to solve this problem? And then you can ask and answer focusing questions, evaluate prior efforts, look at the problem through new lenses, and understand causality. By looking at all of those, it will prevent you from jumping ahead to answers before you’ve really understood what the problem is.

Not expanding the problem space

The second pitfall is being unwilling to expand the problem space. Why would I want to make the problem any worse than it is? Here’s the problem, I can solve this. But that might be a symptom. You need to think through what’s really causing that issue. So tools like blowing up the business and asking the five Whys can help you really define what the core issue is that you’re trying to solve. Sometimes you’re going to focus on things that don’t matter. You’ll come up with a recommendation, and even though it’s insightful, it won’t really change the performance of your organization. The technique there is using the 80/20 principle and asking yourself, “If I solve this, will it have a disproportionate impact on my organization? Or am I solving for that 80% that drives 20% of the results that don’t really matter?” The 80/20 rule will help you focus on results that do.

Taking analytics at face value

Another pitfall is taking the analytical results at face value and just accepting. Well, the answer from the analysis was seven. Well, what does seven mean? What are the implications of that? Techniques to use are getting to that high road, getting out of the analysis and asking yourself, “What does this mean?” And then looking for relationships between the answer from your analysis and other problems you’re trying to solve. Are there clusters? Are there similarities to problems you’ve faced in the past?

Not considering consequences

And the last pitfall you’re going to face in your critical thinking processes is not thinking through the future consequences of your answer. If you implement this, what’s going to happen? What are the knock-on effects of the recommendation? What will your competitors do? What will happen in the organization? What are the new problems you’re going to cause? This is where the seven So Whats can be a very powerful tool to help you understand and appreciate the consequences for the recommendation you’re making.

So, understand that these are the common pitfalls, but the critical thinking tools and techniques I’ve given you will help you avoid those pitfalls and come to better answers.

Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to think critically. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Teach Others How to Think Critically

June 4, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

It’s great if you start using more critical thinking skills. It’s even better if you can get your team to use them.

Here are some simple practices that you can put into place to help your team think more critically:

Give them the tools

First, teach them these tools. Teach them the five whys, the seven so what’s, teach them about blowing up the business. Help them understand how to properly scope a problem. The more effectively you convey these tools to them, the more they’re going to use them on a daily basis.

Create opportunities for them

Second, create opportunities for them to practice these tools. Let them know if they’re going out to solve a problem that you expect them to apply these methods and come back to you with deliverables reflecting the use of these tools.

Coach your team

Third, you’ll need to coach your people on how they’re using these tools. Don’t get too focused on the analytical answers they come to you with. Yes, those are important, but also talk to them about how they got to those answers. Were they using the 80/20? Were they efficient in getting to those insights? Once they got those insights, did they come back up to the high road?

Hold them accountable

And fourth, hold them accountable to using these methods. If somebody comes to you with an analysis and they haven’t thought through the consequences of the recommendation, you need to send them away with the direction to go think through the consequences and come back to you when they’ve thought it through. It’s not always easy holding people accountable to using new tools and methods, but the more you do so, the more you’re going to find they’re thinking critically on their own.

I learned these skills the hard way. I had an engagement manager at one point who was really hard on me in terms of critical thinking skills. Every time I went off and did an analysis and I went to talk to Dave about it, he’d asked me,

Well, why did you do this analysis?

And how did you do the analysis?

Why did you run those numbers you ran?

Why are you making this recommendation?

How does this recommendation tie to your problem statement?

What are the consequences of this recommendation down the road?

And if I couldn’t answer those questions to his satisfaction, his direction was, “I want you to go think about this, come back this afternoon when you’ve thought about it some more, and then we’ll talk about it.” Those weren’t fun conversations for me, but in a very short period of time, and I’m talking about two months of working with Dave every single day, my critical thinking skills got so much better because he told me what I should be focusing on, not just generating the answer, but about how I was doing my work. His ability to teach me these tools, create opportunities for me to practice them, his coaching of me on these methods, and then holding me accountable to using them every single day helped me build my skills very rapidly.

So as you think about trying to get your teams to think more critically, figure out:

When are you going to teach them these tools?

What opportunities will you create in their daily work for them to apply these methods?

How are you going to remind yourself to coach them on the methods? Not just focus on the answer, but coach them on their application of critical thinking skills.

And how are you going to do the difficult thing of holding them accountable when they’re not applying these methods?

You, as the leader, have to focus on these things if you want to build your teams’ critical thinking capabilities. And if you do focus on it, you’ll find they’ll build their skills quite rapidly and you’re going to get to better answers much faster.

Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to think critically. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Consider the Implications of Answers

May 14, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Go one step further after finding an answer to your problem. You may unlock some great opportunities you never would have considered before.

When you’re trying to solve a problem, getting an answer isn’t good enough. Think critically about the results of your analysis and what’s coming back as far as your recommendations go. You should be looking for similarities or differences between the idea and the analytical answers that come out and other situations that you’ve been in. Are there common themes that you’re seeing across multiple problems that you’re trying to solve? Are some elements similar to other problems you’ve solved in the past?

You should be asking about the relative size of the recommendation. Once you’ve completed your analysis, does this even matter? If we solve this problem, will it have a big enough impact on the business for us to even care? And if not, even though it’s a great idea, we should push it off to the side and focus on things that are more meaningful.

You should also explore connections to other problems that you’ve had or other situations you’ve been in because that connection between two things that are seemingly unrelated may unlock a tremendous insight and give you an opportunity to take learnings from the past and apply them to a situation that seems very different, but is actually quite similar. Let me offer an example. At one point, I did some corporate strategy work and we were trying to figure out where we should take the business for the next 10 years. We were looking at things like, “What new products should we launch? What new businesses should we enter? Which new market segments should we pursue? Are there acquisitions we should be going after?” And what we were able to do through all of that analysis was come up with not just an answer to how we decided to prioritize our efforts, but we also generated a process for thinking about how we were going to prioritize our resources and how we were going to think about entering markets, launching products, conducting acquisitions.

Now, several years later, I was working with a technology team and that technology team had the challenge of a lot of projects that were all really great, but they didn’t have the time or the resources to pursue all of them. And when we dug into the problem, when we did the analysis and we found out they had 37 different projects that were rated high, and 54 that were medium, and 200 enhancements that they were supposed to be doing. And when we really understood that the analysis was telling us that we weren’t good at prioritizing, a little light bulb went off and said, “Wait, this is a prioritization problem. That strategy work I did in the past was also about prioritization of scarce resources. Are there things that these problems have in common that I can take from the strategy work and apply to the technology prioritization?” And what was great was I was able to just dust off my strategy process, think about how it could apply to the technology portfolio, and then we not only prioritized the portfolio, but we put a new process in place to prioritize future projects. By understanding the linkages between seemingly unrelated problems, we were able to come up with a solution that we were able to apply very quickly based upon those past learnings.

So when you look at your answers that are coming out of your problem solving processes, think critically about those answers. What connections can you make to other situations? What can you learn from other problems you’ve solved and how can you apply those learnings to the problem you’re trying to solve now? By thinking critically, you may unlock some great opportunities you never would have considered before. That extra time to go one more step beyond the easy answer the analysis gives you and ask what does this mean for the broader problem may help you create one of the best opportunities out there that you get to very efficiently and very effectively.

Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to think critically. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

The High Road and the Low Road of Analysis

May 7, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

If you’re mindful about the way you spend your time when you’re doing analysis, you’re going to be able to solve more problems more effectively and more efficiently.

Critical thinking doesn’t just apply to the analysis you do, it applies to the way you do analysis. Choosing which analysis to do and how to handle the results that come out. I encourage people to take the high road and the low road when they’re thinking about analysis:

The High Road

On the high road, always step up to the high level problem that you’re trying to solve and ask, “How does the analysis I’m doing tied to that problem? What am I proving or disproving with the data that I’m analyzing?” Estimate the benefit of even doing the analysis before you start pulling data. Is it going to be beneficial? Will this analysis help me answer the ultimate question that I’m trying to solve? Use the 80/20 principle and back of the envelope types of calculations to ask, “Will these numbers have any impact?” If they will, continue with the analysis. If they won’t, don’t do the analysis. You don’t have the time. And once you’ve completed the analysis, stay on that high road, test your thinking, and ask, “Does this answer I got from my analysis tie to the recommendation that I’m trying to make? Does it support or does it refute the recommendation I’m making?”

The Low Road

When you think about the low road, which is the deep analysis you’re going to do, you should still be thoughtful about how you approach it. First, only run the numbers you need to run. If you think about your scoped problem statement, and you’re only going to focus on two business units, and that’s what you’ve said is in scope for your solution. You should only be running analysis related to those two business units. If you find yourself pulling data for five or six different business units, you’re wasting your time.

Also, don’t stay in the data too long. It’s very easy to lose an entire day or an entire week doing analysis. We can analyze data for extensive amounts of time. And when you do that, you may be wasting effort. I always tell people when they’re doing deep analysis, don’t polish dirt. And what I mean by that is, when you’re in there doing rough analysis and you’re not sure what the answers ultimately going to be, but you’re trying to figure out, is it hundreds, thousands, or millions? Once you figure out that it’s thousands, you don’t need to take it out several decimal points. You know it’s 5,000 to 7,000, move on with life. You shouldn’t get that refined answer if that refinement isn’t going to add value. Focus your attention on the answers that matter. That analytical time is precious. It chews up a lot of your time and a lot of your team’s time. So get back up to that high road regularly and ask the implications of your analysis.

These critical thought processes should help you question everything you do in terms of solving problems. From defining the problem, to generating recommendations, to doing your analysis, to figuring out if you’ve actually solved the problem. And if you’re more mindful about the way you spend your time when you’re doing analysis, you’re going to be able to solve more problems more effectively and more efficiently.

Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to think critically. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

4 Questions to Make Difficult Switching Decisions Much Easier

May 5, 2025/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Customer Service, Guest Blogger, Sales, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

In an age of too many options, four simple questions can provide a clear approach to making those frequent decisions in a way that saves us time.

Today’s post is by Jack Quarles, author of Expensive Sentences

We live in a time of unprecedented options. Those of us in developed economies of the 21st century, even with average incomes, have more choices than ever before in what we eat, what we wear, our jobs, where we live or travel, our entertainment and education… and the list goes on.

Our ability to customize the details of our lives is dazzling, but it is not free. Abundant options require abundant decisions, and decisions require energy. Life’s never-ending buffet brings byproducts: too many options can paralyze us, and fear of taking the wrong option can haunt us.

We can benefit from thinking about how we make decisions, and intentionally adopting practices that help us manage the cost of decision-making and feel more confident in the choices we do make.

Let’s examine a class of decision that we face every day: stay or go, fish or cut bait, keep on the same path or change direction. More specifically, we’ll consider people and companies we pay, whether at work or at home:

Do I like my accountant, or is it time to switch?
Should I change gyms?
Do we need a new marketing consultant?
Is our lawn care guy charging us too much?

There are both cost and benefit components to these questions. If your gym is nearby and your friends go there, it may be worth twice the price of a different gym with the same equipment because you’re more likely to go and use it. That’s an easy case. Other decisions aren’t so easy, and sometimes those questions of “Am I paying too much for this?” keep lingering in our mind without a clear answer.

Replacing Gray with Black and White