Distilling clarity
As we live in informationally noisy times, it’s increasingly helpful to have ways to proactively see the wood for the trees. Getting to grips with detail, before elevating out to see the important ideas, is what allows us to reconnect ideas together in ways that create greater coherence and sense. This is what is essential for achieving fresh clarity and focus, and often critical for accomplishing the cut-through needed to engage others with our conclusions.
Once we start on the process of systematically unpacking and sorting through our information and ideas, the structure and the solutions can follow. We can start to reveal important ideas that may have been initially overlooked in favour of more dominant ones, and expose any anomalies which can be insightful, precisely for the reason that they don’t fit the rest of the pattern. As Picasso would advocate, the secret is to prune the good, to surface the great.
Through taking a deliberate process of distillation and rebuild, key themes will start to shine through. This can be particularly useful when researching, investigating and analysing a particular issue or topic, especially one that is complex. The Thinkfully Webapp is designed to help you break down your ideas into bitesize pieces, sort through the ideas more fully and give you the freedom to reconnect ideas. From that, the action of prioritising the cornerstone ideas comes about much more readily.
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Detail the detail: From your analysis, put down each interesting and significant idea in the Thinkfully canvas. Don’t worry about the order or position at this stage. Just make sure you keep going to get the key components down.
Loosely order: Looking with fresh eyes, DRAG AND DROP your hexagons around the canvas to play around with some high-level groupings. Think of this as identifying the big buckets of ideas. You may only have a handful of big groupings at this stage. When doing this, try to resist following the automatic or predetermined ways of grouping the ideas without really pausing to look again at the content you have.
Break it down: Now review the hexagons that sit within each big bucket. Check to see if you have expressed one idea per hexagon as clearly and succinctly as possible. For any hexagons that contain more than one central idea, split these into two or more. This act of pushing for singular clarity may prompt for further associated ideas. If so, add these in.
Sub-groups: Within each big bucket, look for the sub groupings that sit within them. Use COLOUR to identify the sub groups more clearly.
Spot relationships: Once you’ve looked at all the sub-groups within each big bucket, stand back and look to see where any sub-groups connect or overlap with any other sub-group, from any of the other big buckets. Where are the interconnecting points? What ideas travel across the key groups? These connecting sub-groups of ideas are most likely to be what helps order the flow and construct the overall narrative. Put these interconnecting points in BOLD.
Pick out the gems: Finally, consider what the priority points are that stand out and explain the most. Identify key ideas that need to be most clearly conveyed using the GEM highlighting feature. At this point, the process should have helped you get an overview of all the ideas in play as well as the connecting ideas that form a narrative which weaves the 'gems' together.