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Read more in: Problem Solving, Productivity.

Last Thursday and Friday I was on a training called Breakthrough Project Management.

It was an on-site training, and Barry Flicker spent two days sharing his approaches to make project management straight-forward and most effective.

I greatly enjoyed the course, and will form a series of posts on project management in the nearest future, but for now I just want to mark this event and recommend you Barry as an excellent mentor with quite a unique training course.

I liked the way Barry presented common project management challenges, and the team games we had played were created in such a way that they perfectly highlighted the most usual problems you’re bound to see in any project.

One lesson learned once and for all is this: communication plays the most important part in any project.

It is vital that roles and common rules of working on a project are communicated out. Goals and tasks need to be clearly defined and presented to the core team of a project. Metrics and checkpoints are to be defined and explained to everyone as well. Only if every member of the core team communicates relevant information effectively, does a project stand chance to be a success.

Playing games helped us see how lack of communication may make even the most talented and proactive people on the team seem to be useless and irrelevant to the success of a project, and it is truly amazing how simpler things really are if you make sure all the assumptions made during the project planning are communicated to others members of the team.

Barry Flicker had been teaching this course for almost 20 years, and that’s why every slide of his presentation is filled with deep meaning and though provoking pointers. If you ever get a chance to attend the Breakthrough Project Management, I strongly recommend you do.

That’s all I wanted to share with you for now, stay tuned for more! Until then – good luck with your project planning!

Read more in: Problem Solving, Productivity.

The key to mastering positive questions is this:

When faced with a difficult situation, learn to start your questioning with this simple question: What positive questions can I ask myself about this?

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Make note of every question

It is vital that every question of yours is noted. Put them in a simple list, or make a complex tree-like structure – it’s up to you, but always document everything. Only when every single question is put down on a paper or entered into one of your electronic documents, you can be sure that you’re starting off properly.

The most important reasons for making notes are:

• it’s easier to think when you take notes. It had been proven numerous times that even simple problems make seem uncomfortably complex just because you have no paper or pencil to work on them. Working on technical problems and doing some calculations, it’s much easier to see what I mean – sometimes just writing down a short list of numbers is all it takes to help you solve a problem.
• it’s easier to maintain your focus. When you have all the questions (and answers) outlined in an easy to follow form, you can always see where you are and stick to the subject.
• it’s easier to maintain a methodical problem solving. What I mean by this is that you have a much smaller chance of repeating your own questions or following the same direction more than once in your thinking process. Having your notes in front of you, it’s easier to see what you’ve already tried.

Never Leave A Question Unanswered

I have written a fairly long blog entry on this subject, so if you haven’t read it yet – please do so: Never Leave A Question Unanswered. Today I’m mentioning this to show one more thing why it is really important.

Asking questions is not very useful on its own. Answering them is what really matters. And since questions usually take form of a logical chain with a sole purpose of filling in the gaps of your knowledge about the problem, it’s important to realise that the more questions you answer before moving forward, the more complete picture you’re going to see and therefore there more easier it is going to be for you to stay focused.

If you don’t take some time to stop and answer some of the earlier questions of yours, you may easily get lost on your way towards the solution. So when asking questions, always maintain the number of unanswered questions as small as possible.

I use a very simple decision-making while asking questions: if I pose a question and it seems to be a fairly easy one to answer, like one of them I think is going to take only a couple of minutes to answer, I stop right there and start formulating the answer. Simply because 2 minutes is mostly an acceptable sacrifice to make in order to get one more answer answered right away. If it feels like it’s going to take longer, I move on.

After some time spent on a problem asking questions this way, always do a quick review. Many quickly answered questions from different thinking directions will be somehow related to other questions and may render some of more complex questions to be easier than you originally thought. So by reviewing all the questions all over again, even by simply glancing through the list of posed questions, you’re effectively making sure you re-assess every question with absolutely all the information you have at hand.

Know why you want a particular question answered

Again, it sounds so simple – but I just had to put it in here. So many people never do this. They pose one question after another, and they never stop to think whether a particular question is even relevant to their original problem at all. Asking yourself why you need a particular answer is always a good way to make sure you’re moving in the right direction. And as with many other routines, there is a number of simple principles:

1. If you don’t know why you need an answer to some question, drop this question. Mark it off your list so that it doesn’t distract you anymore. If you don’t know why you would need an answer, this means that you don’t have a place for neither this question nor this answer in your logical chain of thinking. And it also confirms that answering this question is not going to help you progress simply because you wouldn’t know how and where to use this answer.
2. Maintain your focus and respect priorities. By knowing exactly why you’re posing a particular question and trying to find an answer for it, you stay focused and aware of what impact a particular question might have. Sometimes a simple follow-up on a seemingly simple question triggers a whole chain of then-obvious steps to resolve the problem or reveals an area of your problem where you should concentrate on.

Taking just a few seconds to realize the purpose of answering each of the questions you pose is definitely worth the comfort and confidence it gives you in your problem solving.

I hope this short article will help you in your problem solving, and I’ll definitely write more on the subject in the future.

Let me know what you think – is there is anything you agree or disagree with? Are there some other approaches in asking questions you find particularly useful? What works for you and what doesn’t? Please let me know – I’m very keen to learn from you!

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Read more in: Personal Development, Problem Solving, Productivity.

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• Asking Questions The Smart Way
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Read more in: Motivation, Personal Development, Problem Solving, Productivity.

Do you want to know why? As surprising as it may sound, in most cases the explanation is hidden within ourselves.

Let me explain. Why do we ask others to share their opinion with us, and why do we seek for advices? This usually happens when we’ve reached a certain stage with our task, and we stop and think it would be better now to know what others think of it, and maybe take some of their ideas and apply them, instead of trying to continue on our own.

Seeking advice isn’t anything negative.

It doesn’t mean we’re weak or stupid, incapable of solving a problem or accomplishing a given goal. What it means is a willingness to do what we have to do in the most optimal way. Seeking advice means being open-minded.

It means welcoming other’s opinions and being ready to listen and understand what other people have to say. Seeking advice essentially shows your willingness to broaden horizons of your thinking, and demonstrates your ability to factor in some things you haven’t thought of when you just started working on the problem.

Is it possible to accomplish some goals without asking for any advices at all? Of course it is! But it really is a matter of your self-confidence. If you’re very comfortable with the task and you have a clear vision of accomplishing it, you may not need or want any advice. After all, you could (and should!) be the one person doing something best of all, and then not only will you be able to achieve great results without any advices, but instead you’ll be able to help others out by sharing your wisdom and giving advices to them.

Why ask for advice at all?

In lots of situations, when we ask for advice, we really expect a substantial help. We quite often will get irritated when a person starts giving us general pieces of wisdom in return to a very specific question. Most often, we ask for a specific advice, and get easily irritated when we’re getting a different kind of advice. It could be a priceless one, but if it doesn’t help our immediate task, we don’t want it.

Another thing about seeking advices is that even when we get something useful, we keep searching for the best advice possible. The stage when we start asking people for advices suggests that we’ve probably got our problem practically solved, but we wouldn’t mind an opinion on making our solution a perfect one. If there are few final touches to be made and for some reason we haven’t seen them ourselves, we’d like others to point these areas out and explain how to improve the situation.

Why some advices are bad

Look back at some of the advices you’ve asked for and you suddenly felt irritated with. Why did you find those advices bad? They probably were genuine, so people must be trying to help. Yet, the help you’ve received wasn’t what you were looking for.

This explains perfectly what a bad advice is. It’s a piece of information you haven’t found particularly useful in the context of your problem and your question.

So why some advices are bad? Is it something wrong with the people you ask? Possible, but not as nearly often the case as you might think. What is it then? It’s simply the wrong context. What you’re asking for isn’t what a given person is talking about. So you get an advice, but it doesn’t help you much.

The responsibility for bad advices quite often lies on yourself and not on the people you seek advices from.

Find the right person to ask for an advice

As simple as it may seem, this is the rule which might help you get much better advices from people around you. Before asking your questions, think what kind of help you’re looking for, and try seeing whether a particular person is the best one to ask for a help. This explains most of your frustrations when you ask for advice and get unexpectedly frustrating one in return. This is simply because you’ve incorrectly chosen a person to talk to. Try and find a better one, ideally the best person to ask your question.

I’m not saying all the bad advices you’ve got were bad simply because you’ve chosen wrong people. There could be lots of other factors involved: someone could be misleding you, or someone could be mistaken himself and then give you a wrong advice absolutely unintentionally. There are other factors too, it’s impossible to name all of them.

But since we’re talking about self-improvements, finding a better person to seek advice from is one of the factors you can easily improve on.

So what person would be the best one to seek advice from?

It is the person in a better (best) position, similar to yours. So, if you’re trying to solve a particular problem, seek for someone who is known for successfully solving a similar problem in the past. If you’re starting up a business, seek for an advice from a successfull business owner.

The key point here is that you should always seek for an advice from someone in a substantionally better position, if not in the best one. This is important, because if you talk to someone who’s in a position worse than yours, even the sincere advice may turn out to be a very bad one for you.

See for yourself: why ask for an advice on a particular problem from a person who had never dealt with a similar problem? Any polite person would genuinely try helping you, but if they got no relevant experience, this would be very hard, and they would end up giving you either something very generic, or suggesting something you would reckon to be the worst advice possible. There’s no reason to be angry with such people, they did their best and it really isn’t their fault they couldn’t help you more.

How exactly do you get the best advice possible?

Contentrate on your particular problem or task, and try your best at finding the best person to talk to. Even a short and simple advice from the right person would be of much more help to you than a very long and complex solution suggested by someone who isn’t really in a position to give any advices to you.

[tags]best advice, self-growth, asking questions[/tags]

Read more in: Personal Development, Problem Solving, Productivity.

Recovering after some kind of failure is a very hard skill to obtain, but as with any kind of skill, it is quite real and possible to develop. So all I want to do today is to share only a few of the important things to keep in mind when working on your recovery skills.

No surprises – no shock

The worst thing about any failure is when it happens unexpectedly. It immediately upsets you that some things didn’t go as planned, and that you couldn’t do something you honestly believed you were quite capable of.

It’s all about an element of surprise, really. If you knew the failure was about to happen, you’d have taken some additional steps to prevent it from happening. So when it comes to improving your quick recovery skills, first of all it should be an improvement of your own awareness of what’s happening.

If you’re taking a part in a game, or if it’s some situation at work requiring a bit of competitiveness from you, or if it’s just another ordinary evening walk you’re having – try to be aware of things around you. Don’t expect anything bad to happen, don’t predict the failure to happen, but at the same time never exclude such outcomes in any situation. Anything could happen, and you can’t obviously be alert 100% of your time and be prepared for any kind of disaster to happen, but every little helps – sometimes doing very little you really protect yourself from surprising shocks.

Know your weakness

It might sound simple, but it is the most usual reason of lacking the quick recovery abilities. After all, it is a natural thing that most people hate revisiting their weaknesses. But what’s always a surprise to me, is that many people don’t know some of their weaknesses, and in some cases they don’t know any weaknesses of theirs at all.

It is surprising for me because I rarely do something without some kind of estimation. Lots of things are constantly factored in – sometimes I consider the benefit of doing or not doing something, or it could be that I want to know how time consuming a particular task will be. In many cases it could be your physical abilities. And while some of such factors are fairly obvious and easy to estimate, others are not.

For instance, you wouldn’t try to open a door of your car while driving on a highway and jump out, and you wouldn’t do it not because of some physical limitations – you’re probably strong enough to open a door and make a jump, but because of other things you automatically consider – like what usually happens when you’re out of your car at such a high speed. The same way you consider lots of things when making decisions every minute of your life. But for some reason, this thoughtful approach isn’t always there when you’re competing with someone.

So to recover really quick, you should know your limitations, and at least admit that if you lose because one of them, there wasn’t much you could do. If you accept this thought, and concentrate on your strong areas to achieve the goal, it wouldn’t be as much a shock to you if you make a mistake or lose because of one of your weak areas.

All this would mean is that you’ve just had a very natural thing happen to you – you knew it was your weak area, you tried your best, but there was a point after which you couldn’t do any better. And it’s nothing shameful or nothing shocking – it’s a natural way of things. Remember, that your competitor might have enough skills to recognize your weaknesses and to exploit them – and this fact would again be a valid and possible outcome of the situation, and not a shock.

Another positive side of knowing your weaknesses is that you can then plan and decide on what tactics you should employ to cover your weak areas, to become more competitive. Learn to turn your weaknesses from disadvantages into something neutral and quite normal, something you wouldn’t worry as much.

Learn your strong points

If you’re good, you’re good. Know your strong points and make it a habit improving them. Learn to take advantage of your strong points. Learn to use your strong areas to make up for the weak ones.

Strong points are fairly easy to identify. It’s what you like doing most, and where you feel most competitive. The explanation is really simple – if you like doing something, you tend to do it more often than other things. And as practice makes perfect, it excels your skills firstly among the things you do most often.

It is also a good idea to listen what others have to say about your strong areas. You can always ask them about your weak areas too, but somehow people don’t like others telling them about it. We tend to feel more vulnerable when we realise that people around us see our weaknesses so well. But for the strong areas, we’re always happy to hear another opinion. We like people reassuring us how good and strong we are in a particular subject, and it pleases us to know that it’s not only yourself, but others who recognize you strong in some areas.

Observe and adapt

It’s rarely a case when you are the only person who could fail. Never forget the simple truth: everyone and anyone can fail at some stage. Not everyone is afraid of it as much as you are, but as we’ve established, this could be helped. So do your observations – look at how people react to their successes and failures, and try to behave in a similar way.

There are few advantages to such a way of adapting. First and foremost – you see other people fail and you realise it yet again that failure is just a part of the game, and a very possible thing to happen to anyone. How many times have you looked at someone really good at their subject, thinking to yourself: anyone could fail, anyone but him. But secretly you hoped something would make this person fail someday, and of course you laughed sarcastically and it somehow pleased you when you finally saw the moment of such a failure.

Accept it – everyone fails, and not always it’s due to the personal qualities and features. Quite often there is absolutely nothing you could do. There is nothing anybody could do. So all you do in such situations is to accept this and think one step forward – what needs to be done next to make up for the opportunity you’ve just lost.

Observation also helps you recognize a typical reaction of people to their failures, and when you learn the basics of it, you could react in exactly the same way when and if you fail. Observation and adaptation of a common reaction will absorb the shock of a failure, because not only will you know that there’s nothing wrong with a failure, but you will also know that your behaviour is absolutely normal, because that’s exactly the way so many others reacted to a similar failure.

You could also use adaptation as an advantage. Just do what everybody else did when failing, and you’ll make sure that no one can really guess how hard a blow this failure really is for you. Use is to protect yourself. Act the most common way and you’ll make it as hard as possible for anyone to see your fear or your frustration about the situation.

Always remember, that no matter what happens – there will be people around you doing the same observation and adaptation. So even if hiding your real feelings or natural reaction of yours for a given failure could be of huge importance and advantage.

Never stop

This is the last piece of advice I have for today. Never stop – this means if you do stumble and fail, make yourself take the next step. Don’t allow yourself to stop, overcome all your fears and frustration, pain or hesitations, and push yourself forward. Just remember, that failure is never a good moment to analyze the situation. When you fail, you naturally feel upset, and your judgement is bound to be clouded by this. And since it is in your interest to at least make sure the situation doesn’t get worse, please do take this extra step forward and only then, when there’s less pressure and less frustration left, take your time to think why you have failed and what could be done to prevent it.

This is in essence what people call a quick recovery – when even after the most horrible mistake made you find strength to move forward no matter what, to stay in the game and to remain competitive. And this is exactly what makes them take a closer look at you to either admire the strength you’ve found for a recovery or to suddenly realise how much better a player you really are.

So never stop, and don’t you worry – there’s always plenty of time to analyse what went wrong and to find ways of improvement later. Now, don’t take this last advice of mine directly. If you made an honest mistake, take it easy and move on. But don’t do anything stupid just because you think you have to do something.

There should always be a common sense involved in all your actions, so by asking you not to stop I really mean if you failed but think you can push yourself just a bit extra harder to hide your frustration and move on – please do so as it’s in your interest. But if there isn’t much to be done right away – accept it. Don’t rush things in, don’t immediately try to repeat the same set of actions as they’re most likely to incur the same kind of mistake yet again.

Well, hope this helps. I really should be giving more examples from my everyday life, so I think that’s what I’ll start doing with my next entry in a few days time. Till then, good bye!

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Why do we ask questions?

You get a question asked, and it’s the casual type one – you’re expected to give an answer within few seconds, and it’s perfectly okay if you don’t know the answer – the person who asked you will just move on to try his luck with someone else.

How often do you get asked questions? I mean, any kind of question – be it something related to the position you have in your company or some personal advice people want from you? Rarely will you have not a single question asked during an average working day. Chances are, you’ll be asked at least few times during your day. And depending on how popular or smart you are, people will turn to ask for your wisdom more and more.

Giving valuable answers

When asking questions, surely people tend to note your answers and how correct and accurate they are, but they also look at your ability to face questions you don’t have an immediate answer for. Sometimes they deliberately ask you a question no one can answer, and they simply watch how you play it. In fact, your ability to find an answer to such questions is considered to be one of the best personal and professional skill you can possess.

First things first – no lies. If you don’t know the answer, don’t lie about it – just be strong enough to admit your lack of knowledge on the subject. Don’t say anything just for the sake of giving some kind of answer – your good reputation and trust of your colleagues may be lost with just one stupid answer you gave abruptly and without proper thinking on it, yet it might take you hundreds of brilliant, intelligent and perfectly correct answers to earn this trust and respect again.

Then, know your strong points and your weak areas. Learn to quickly give any question an estimation which suggests whether you’re capable of answering a particular kind of question or not. Always remember: you’ve got your trust and respect to protect. Evaluate each question, see how important it is to others that you give the correct answer.

How to answer questions

Answering questions is easy, once you stick to this idea: a question is asked, because someone wants to know a correct answer. What kind of answer is correct? Most people would agree, that to give a correct answer is to provide a meaningful and useful information, which is 100% correct in your opinion. But not many people realise that simply saying “I don’t know, sorry” is a correct answer as well. Don’t let this idea get out of your sight when you’re looking for an answer.

Remember: you were asked a question because someone believes you to be a reliable source of information. If you say “I don’t know”, your credibility stays the same, because you’ve estimated all the factors, realised you don’t know the right answer, and you’re being honest to say so.

But if you decided to give some kind of answer, and it later proves to be an incorrect one, your credibility will be shaken – people will think and try to understand why you gave this answer instead of simply saying no. And they will probably think something along these lines about you: You simply tried to trick them. You deliberately tried to mislead them. You didn’t know the answer but you were too ashamed to admit it, so you opted for telling the first thing which came to your mind just to look more knowledgeable than you really are.

And as people think of it more and more (remember, we’re talking dozens of questions asked and answered daily), they will make their opinion up about every person they ask around, and it will be very hard to change their attitude to a given person at a later time.

To people looking for some answers, it is important that they get the correct answer. So if you say “I don’t really know”, they will thank you for this anyway – you haven’t given them the answer, but you haven’t given them a false one neither – so they think something like: Oh well, you can’t know everything. I’ll ask someone else.

And they do. And the next question they have from a different field, they’ll probably think again: Hey, why don’t I ask this guy first – so what if he didn’t know answers to lots of questions asked before? He certainly has some strong points, so maybe he knows exactly the answer I need?

Patterns we all follow

So when we look at a certain company, or a group of people within, talking to each other and asking questions, it’s obvious that everyone follows some kind of pattern when dealing with questions raised.

Some people, when they face a problem or see something they can’t understand, decide to concentrate for a little bit more and see if they can manage on their own. Others immediately opt for asking someone around – this smart guy at the end of the corridor is a good option, or this lovely girl just across the cubicle – it’s not a big deal if they don’t know the answer, but it’s definitely worth a try.

And in exactly the same way, people follow various patterns when asked a question. Some couldn’t possibly care less and they will say anything simply to get rid of you. Others will take you so seriously that even if you thank them and return to your desk, they will hunt you down after a lunch break to hand you in a pile of paper with their formulas and graphs, representing the ideal answer to your question.

Yet another category of people will fairly quickly think of your question and give you a yes or no, and then forget about it. I think this is the most common category of people. Very efficient approach: they think over your question, they honestly try to find an answer, and they give up or give you an answer fairly quickly.

Productivity tip: answer every question

What shocks me though, is that this most common category of people will never come back to your questions once you’re gone. That may be okay for the questions they answered correctly, but it’s a mystery to me why people don’t get curious when they didn’t know the answer.

Again, it’s a case of judging the question – if you see it’s somehow relevant to your work or other activity, you’d probably get a little bit more irritated with yourself for not knowing the answer, but even after this – most of us will simply forget about it few minutes later.

Now, I obviously don’t belong to this most common category of people. ANY question I couldn’t answer will raise some interest in me. But if it’s related to my profession, I simply can’t throw it away – if I have a spare minute, I’ll find the answer myself or google it. If I don’t have an immediate chance to answer the question, I’ll most likely think of it in the background, so once I’m at home, I’ll make some time specifically to find the answer. This way, if I ever get asked the same question again (and you know how some people like coming back to you the following day with the very same question, don’t you?), I’ll definitely have one, and it will be the 100% correct one cause I’ve specifically looked for it.

Some people will say it’s impossible to know everything. And I totally agree. And even if that was possible, you don’t have all the time in the world. And this is true too. But it’s never harmful to expand your knowledge a little, is it?

Once you master questions judgment and estimation, you’ll be able to see how important this question is and whether it’s worth your time and efforts thinking of an answer or looking for it.

Sure it takes time to find an answer for something, but you’ll be surprised how many answers are really easy to find, and once you get into a habit of resolving most of unanswered questions, soon enough you’ll realise that these simple questions and found answers have started building your fundamental knowledge – they help you answer others more quickly, and save a lot of your time in the long run.

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