Defrag

Here is a starting set of simple techniques for reducing the seemingly unavoidable costs multitasking:

1. Task Completion.
2. Task-Batching.
3. FocusTimes.
4. Interruption Windows.
5. Scheduled Catch-Ups.
6. Interruption Processing Slots.
7. Cognitive Momentum Caching.

Flow-Optimisation

1. Flow-RATE Acceleration: Get more through the bottleneck.
2. Flow-TIME Reduction:1 + reduce Wait|Rework|Process|Travel|Setup time.
3. Flow-QUALITY Optimisation: Target the primary Poor Quality Causes and Good Quality Levers.
4. Flow-COST Containment: Target the primary cost contributors.
5. Flow-STATE Enablement: use Defrag & Provisionals to trigger & retain mental flow-state.

TAP (Time Allocation Planning)

We have a tendency to allocate time, focus & energy to what we can make the most difference to, rather than to what will make the most end-to-end difference.

Instead, estimate how much time you spend on each activity and compare it with the ideal amount of time you would like to spend on each.  Then develop strategies to move from the current to the ideal allocation.

Even small changes to time allocation deliver huge gains in end-to-end performance and fulfilment.

Provisionals Technique

Provisionals Technique is deliberately adopting very rough and of necessity inadequate solutions ahead of any thought or research.

The power of provisionals lies in their creation of a tangible working solution - that is a lot easier to enhance than an ethereal solution that doesn't yet exist.

Provisionals can take the form of a few descriptive words or a rough diagram or barely-working prototype: anything to trigger of the enhancement phase of the innovation cycle.

Process & Practice Streamlining

1. Use Defrag & Flow-Optimsation.
2. Separate Process and Practice.
3. Reverse-engineer from ultimate states.
4. Float decision-points to the top.
5. Separate Decision/Assessment from Solutions and Actions.
6. Take advantage of asymmetry.
7. Run Deep Practice sessions on the most challenging processes/practices.

Project Streamlining

1. Pool time-, risk-, people-, equipment- and materials-contingency to improve predictability, due date performance and value created.
2. Use reverse-engineering and prerequisite planning, to ensure that everything essential and nothing superfluous is included.
3. Minimise multitasking on the current critical path.
4. Check that the critical path isn't delayed by missing previous steps, info, equipment, materials & people
5. Use Agile & Scrum to small-batch iterations & reduce time & energy wasted on unnecessarily.

TurboMeetings

Different meeting-plans for different meeting-types:

Set the default meeting duration to 25m instead of 60.

1. Progress Meetings: Done|Left|Next|Target.
2. Decision Meetings: Decision Criteria|Proposal|2 Alternatives|Rationale.
3. Solution Meetings: Multiple 90s solution generation & then integration cycles, against SDR.
4. Planning Meetings: Enhance a provisional reverse-engineered plan, collaboratively.
5. Alignment Meetings: METEOR.

AGI

(Alternative Generation & Integration)

Generate and integrate significant alternatives to a starting provisional solution.

The starting provisional solution defines and is defined by the box one is currently thinking in.

Generating alternatives to it forces one to come up with something outside that box: a solution that defines its own - different - box. Integrating the solution ideas defines a new - more powerful and valid - box.

AWAPITA

(As Well As Possible In The Time
Available/Allocated/Assigned)

Completing something AWAPITA rather than ASAP switches the focus from perfection-as-long-as-it-takes to getting-it-done-in-a-timely-way-even-if-it's-not-perfect).  It enables us to overcome perfectionism, procrastination and multitasking and accelerate innovation and productivity.

It combines well with Provisionals, AGI and fast-cycle, multi-pass innovation.

Burning Platform

Create - or help people see - the urgency of a looming survival deadline that requires immediate action.

We are often more motivated by the need to avoid loss, pain, danger and extinction than by opportunity to advance ourselves.

The immediacy of the threat adds deadline pressure to the fear and galvanises us into action that an uncertain, future threat or opportunity can't. It's not sustainable in the long term but does serve to overcome inertia in the short term.

Capability Assessment & Acceleration Framework

(Capability Assessment & Acceleration Framework - Excel Template)

1. Determine the prerequisite capabilities for exceptional performance.
2. Conduct and compare competency assessments against each capability. 
3. Select from, adapt and add to a universal set of dramatic improvement frameworks for accelerating capability in the lagging capabilities.

Change Framework

Diagnose and intervene, surgically at the lagging prerequisite(s) for change.

Resistance to change is very seldom illogical - never mind willful. There is nearly always a perfectly understandable reason for it - even if not a totally valid one.

Identifying, ahead of time, the full set of potentially valid and understandable concerns that people might have - and providing ways of addressing them to everyone's satisfaction, smoothes the way for and enhances change.

ChangeGenius Pattern

It's not enough to have a new and demonstrably better solution to a challenging situation or thing - we also need to be able to implement the new solution - in the face of highly developed competence in the old way and virtually no competence in the new way.

It's a whole lot easier if we make the transition early - ideally pre-emptively - before we are already on the well-worn and comfortable path to where we no longer want to go.

Articulate the five elements and practice!

CommonStreaming

Ensure that change is closely aligned with people's interests and passions - even if not as closely aligned with the change sought.

Start by introducing change in areas most aligned with the change that people are already interested and passionate about - to capitalise on existing energy and momentum.

It's sometimes even worthwhile to head in the opposite direction to the change sought, temporarily, to gain momentum, relieve pain and stress and foster alignment and synergy.

Completion Sequence Scheduling

Process work in completion order sequence (plus lead-time and buffer) rather than in a FIFO way.

We have a tendency to prioritise earliest placed, rather than earliest due requests and orders.

The result is unnecessary multitasking, escalations, late deliveries and stress - all contributing to reduced capacity and fulfilment.

Scheduling by completion date and time resolves this significantly and enables us to set expectations that we know we can beat.

Comprehensive Strategy Fractal

The Comprehensive Strategy Fractal extends the GPS and Enhanced-GPS model to include:

1. Current Reality in contrast with Ultimate Goal
2. The Performance-Limiting Problem.
3. The Natural Response to it and how that response exacerbates the Problem and has Unavoidable Consequences that bring the Current Reality About - and
4. The Prerequisites for the Goal and the Counter-Intuitive Solution to the Problem.

Conflict Resolver

There are extremely few conflicts that can't be resolved beneficially to both drivers.

Instead of seeking the best Compromise between Conflicting options, identify and validate the drivers behind those Options and break (rather than find the best Compromise to) the Conflict, by looking for ways in which each driver can be advantaged rather than disadvantaged by the satisfaction of the other.

It's even easier if you have a set of standard breakthrough resolution options to choose from.

Constraint Reliever

The performance of any complex system or challenging situation is limited by a single constraint (Theory Of Constraints), so:

1. Work out what you're seeking to accelerate.
2. Establish where the Constraint is.
3. Determine what the current Investment is
4. Understand how Current Solution increases Investment and compounds the Constraint.
5. Develop a new Solution that (a) Relieves the Constraint and (b) Reduces Investment.

Decision Ready Reporting

Financial reporting is often difficult to understand, draw deductions from or make informed decisions against.

Decision-Ready Reporting equips financial people to equip managers and executives with the insights they need into performance indicators and the response options they have and the impact each of them will have on performance, going forward. 

Without Decision-Ready Reporting, managers and execs are effectively flying blind!

Deep Practice

1. Break the desired performance into its key steps or elements.
2. Repeatedly and uninterruptedly learn then practice each of the elements independently
3. Slowly at first and with
4. Increasing speed and pressure
5. Combine the various elements together.

Myelin reduces electrical signal degradation and increases the flow of current which strengthens thinking patterns and performance.

Defrag

Here is a starting set of simple techniques for reducing the seemingly unavoidable costs multitasking:

1. Task Completion.
2. Task Batching.
3. FocusTimes.
4. Interruption Windows.
5. Scheduled Catch-Ups.
6. Interruption Processing Slot.
7. Cognitive Momentum Caching.

Deliberate Cheerfulness

Even naturally cheerful people sometimes battle to maintain a cheerful disposition in times of stress and conflict - especially when they're treated poorly or unfairly.

Deliberate Cheerfulness provides a set of simple steps that anyone can follow - and learn to make instinctive - to improve both mood and behaviour - even (especially) when things are tough and people are unkind and abusive.

It combines logical, emotional and physical techniques for making the transformation.

Deliberate Empathy

A collection of techniques for deliberately and systematically securing, instilling and disseminating empathy and become empathic.

One of the biggest failures in the human condition is the Fundamental Attribution Error: attributing malicious intent to others and extenuating circumstances to ourselves.

It's only when we truly walk in another's shoes - as them, not us - that we realise that they're more like us than we realised and begin to truly empathise with and respect them.

Deliberate Evolution

Deliberately, systematically and iteratively improve a situation or thing focusing on improvement dimensions, failure modes and opportunity modes.

Deliberately Evolution comprises a simple method of checking for enhancement opportunities against a set of simple frameworks that identify the most valuable improvement dimensions and most common failure and opportunity modes.

Deliberate Respect

A set of simple techniques for deliberately and systematically respecting others and engendering respect in them for you and others.

Like Deliberate Empathy and Deliberate Trust, there seems to be no quick and reliable way to transform someone's contempt - or lack of respect - into respect, but it's eminently achievable, with a clear understanding of the common failure and opportunity modes and a commitment to making the reality proceed the recognition.

Deliberate Simplicity

Simplicity is a lot harder to achieve than complexity and complicatedness - and the benefits virtues of simplicity are more valuable and far-reaching than they may at first seem.

Deliberate Simplicity is a set of common simplification patterns to the most common complexity and complicatedness challenges we face, especially in introducing better ways of thinking about, approaching and doing things. It helps overcome the inevitability of sophistication and its role in simplicity.

Deliberate Synergy

A simple set of dramatic improvement patterns and techniques for forging synergy (2 + 2 =5 ) from dysergy (2 + 2 = 4) and antergy (2 + 2 = 3).

The opportunities for synergy - even in personal task-management, never mind in our interaction with other people and between product and service features - are immense: but we seldom see them.

There's a good reason for this and a simple way to overcome it.

Deliberate Trust

A collection of techniques for deliberately and systematically securing, instilling and disseminating trust and becoming trusting and truly trustworthy.

Trust is the natural consequence of - and can only be secured by - an unbroken series of trust-rewarding experiences.

This set of techniques enables one to secure this, even without a starting opportunity or in the face of a trust destroying history with the person concerned.

Deliberate Weight-loss

We gain and retain weight by absorbing more calories than we burn.  To lose weight we need to ingest fewer calories and burn more calories.

This requires energy and will power, which is the real challenge. Deliberate Weight-loss treats energy and will power as twin constraints and provides techniques for increasing them both.

Instead of using will power to give up fattening food for ever, use it to delay eating - and exercise and eat healthily in the interim to increase energy-levels and reduce hunger and thirst.

EMP

(Enhanced|Minimalistic|Proposed)

1. Listing the ultimate ideal features of any solution, process, product service or project.
2. Develop a bare-bones, Minimalistic feature set, ruthlessly removing the non-essential.
3. Develop a Proposed feature-list - closer to the minimalistic one than the ideal one, to ensure a Minimum-Viable-Product | Small-Batch approach, leaving enhanced features for future iterations.

Engage-As-If

1. Engage-As-If has two forms: repositioning yourself in people's minds (e.g. in applying for a more senior role) and bringing people who mistreat or bully you to adopt a more respectful and conciliatory stance.

The essence, in both cases, is to engage, respond and interact as if you were the person you want to be or be treated as, as if they were treating you in the way you desire - even if they aren't.

It shapes both your behaviour and theirs!

Engagement Framework

The primary reasons for disengagement are:

1. Real or perceived organisational, leadership and/or initiative misalignment with people's interests and
2. Lack of skills and experience in leading or dealing with change.

The Engagement Framework comprises Design, Communication, Response Contribution and Reinforcement Frameworks to overcome these challenges.

Exceeding Expectations Technique

It is not always possible to deliver what people want but , in most situations, it's better to set and manage people's expectations so that they can guide themselves accordingly.

EET involves setting and expectation that we know we can exceed, identifying the potential failure modes and committing to updating people as things unfold, then repeating the cycle at appropriate periods of time and as reality does unfold. This exceeds people's expectations - even if reality conspires against us/them.

Failure Mode Determination

We have a tendency, once we have a solution idea in a challenging situation, to become so focused on building the steps in implementing the solution that we neglect to rigorously check for potential solution failure modes.

Deliberately checking failure modes, by asking, "Under what condition could this solution fail?" enables us to surface the hidden assumptions about the reality we face and escape the tunnel vision that arises from developing intricate solutions to extremely challenging situations.

Flow-Rate Acceleration

1. Draw the flow.
2. Identify the end-to-end bottleneck.
3. Optimise the bottleneck for performance.
4. Introduce QC immediately before the bottleneck.
5. Choke the inflow to match the bottleneck's.
6. Buffer the bottleneck to protect it.
7. Introduce pre- and post-processing.
8. Add bottleneck capacity.

Flow-Time Reduction

Flow-time is related to, but distinct from flow-rate. Flow-rate affects flow-time, but are other things that contribute to flow-time, including:

1. Rework time.
2. Wait-time.
3. Setup-time.
4. Processing time.
5. Curing time.
6. Travel-time.

FocusTime Scheduling

Set time slots aside for working uninterrupted by internal parties.

Choose times that you are least likely to be interrupted and let people who often interrupt you know ahead of time so that they can guide themselves accordingly.

Publish both your FocusTimes and Interruption Windows (another Defrag solution) so that people are familiar with when the most and least ideal times to interrupt you are.

Future Retrospective

Future Retrospective is a more comprehensive version of the subsequently developed Pre- Mortem, in that it investigates not only the reasons for failure, but also the keys to success, opportunities encountered and the learnings achieved.

The objective is to enhance the project plan and project team preparedness by deliberately catalysing foresight by engaging hindsight in each of the key contributory modes.

GBE (Good|Bad|Exceptional)

GBE gets people to list current and potential good and bad features and experiences of products and services in a brainstorming way.

Then collaborate to develop good features and experiences against each bad one - with a view to replacing the bad ones with good ones.

The real impact comes from the third step, which is to create a third, Exceptional column/category to bring people to extrapolate and use other techniques to significantly exceed their best previous ideas.

Golden Assumption

Recognise that most of the interpersonal conflict and disagreement arises from misalignment, miscommunication, misconstruing, misinterpreting and mistakes and instead of assuming mal-intent, assume that the other person wants what you want and

Golden Window of Opportunity

Help people see the limited time opportunity for significant gains to catalyse engagement and action.

We tend to be blind to opportunity until it's too late - but are often motivated to exploit limited time opportunities through fear of loss.

Identifying and communicating the advantages the opportunity provides and the limited size of the time window we have to capitalise on it is an effective way to bring people to take action.

GPS (Goal|Problem|Solution)

Identify:

1. The single goal all stakeholders share, immediately and into the future,
2. The single core problem they all face, immediately and into the future - from which all other issues and symptoms arise and then
3. develop a single, simple breakthrough solution that solves the single core problem and secures the single goal for all parties in all timeframes.

Idea-Logging Trick

The prefrontal-cortex - the most recently evolved part of the human brain and responsible for executive function is still very primitive and doesn't much capacity and isn't very efficient.

Freeing it up from having to remember ideas that it doesn't need to work on right now has a significant impact on both capacity and efficiency, so recording your ideas - physically or electronically - as you have them enables you to think of new and better ideas far faster and with greater fidelity.

Impact Revolution

The Impact Revolution is a way to orchestrate ongoing dramatic improvement, individually and collectively.

It involves using a set of simple, brain-friendly diagnostic and intervention frameworks daily, weekly and monthly to focus our dramatic improvement efforts and energies at the current constraint in our individual and/or collective impact constraint.

It's designed to appeal to those whose impact aspirations exceed their actual impact.

Innovation Hothouse

Run a succession of 90-second idea generation and recognition sessions to generate increasingly outside the box ideas and integrate and evolve them into simple counter-intuitive dramatic improvement breakthrough solution.

Innovation Hothouse has a number of advantages over conventional Brainstorming techniques, because it allows people to generate ideas in parallel and enables everyone's (not just the dominate personalities') ideas to be captured and built upon, collaborate lively.

Interruption Processing Slots

Schedule time slots, ahead of time, for processing non-urgent interruptions that occur when we're in the middle of something else.

When interrupted by an external party, discern how urgent and important an immediate response is. If the matter is important rather than truly urgent, say something like: "I have a slot at 3pm this afternoon that I can do this in - would that work for you, or do you need it more urgently than that?

Interruption Prompting Method

(Interruption Scheduling or Emergency Interruption Scheduling or Emergency Pre-emption?)

Very few of the interruptions we get are truly important and urgent enough to interrupt what we're currently doing. The exceptions are interruptions by people who leave things to the last minute, as the result of procrastination or a lack of planning and foresight.

Interruption Prompting is checking in with these people at an appropriate time and frequency to prompt them to think about what they will need in the future, thereby reducing the incidence of emergency interruptions.

Just-In-Time Scheduling

A huge percentage of human and machine production capacity is wasted as the result of constant rescheduling of workload.

Just-In-Time Scheduling reduces this wasted activity by combining precise-scheduling for a shorter period more frequently with rough sequence-scheduling for the remainder.

It's crucial to define and observe scheduling rules that deal with different lead-times, batch-sizes and urgencies - including provisional scheduling for work-items that have not entered the workflow yet.

LOAD  (Less Of A Dick)

The LOAD Solution is a simple diagnostic and intervention framework for bad behaviour.

It comprises a list of common forms, symptoms and triggers of dickish behaviour and provides different techniques and mechanisms for replacing them with more kind, respectful and attractive behaviours.

Like the Impact Revolution, it encourages daily, weekly and monthly review sessions and accompanying approaches in addition to situational tools and techniques.

Mental Bookmarking

Cognitive Momentum Caching is capturing the current direction as well as what has led up to it and insights into what will be required going forward from the interruption point, before switching to the new interrupting task or activity.

This benefits both the interrupted task, on its resumption, and the interrupting task on its commencement - because of the reduced cognitive load as a result of not needing to retain momentum, mentally, on the interrupted task while commencing the interrupting task.

Mindsets to Adopt & Avoid

Because change is only required occasionally, we aren't as good at adapting to it as we think we are.

It's difficult to work out whether we're resisting change because the new approach is flawed or because we're adopting the wrong mindset.

This solution identifies the primary mindsets to adopt and avoid and provides simple frameworks to help you and others adopt and avoid them.

It’s a very powerful way to secure synergy in the face of change.

MODIF

(Multi-Option Diagnostic & Intervention Frameworks)

MODIFs help us escape the fundamental human condition problem of unconscious incognizance (not knowing what we don't know we don't know - but need to know).

MODIFs give us virtual capability and insight to deal with situations beyond our current innate reach until we can develop the innate capability and insight required.

NextGen Solution

Bring the future forward by imagining what the next version of a solution, process, product, or service would look like.

Prompting oneself to look beyond the current hill-top not only prepares us for what's to come, but brings us to introduce key elements of the next generation solution into the current one - especially if those elements end up being simpler and quicker and easier to develop than the currently envisaged ones.

Opportunity Mode Identification

Every challenge in a challenging situation presents many opportunities that are often invisible to us, because we're seeing the challenging element as a negative thing to be overcome rather than a positive thing to be capitalised upon.

Deliberately looking for not just the silver lining but the huge windfall the challenge has to offer delivers huge benefits in being able to turn a sows ear into a silky purse.

Parallel Innovation

Pursue multiple innovation paths in parallel, to reduce risk, enrich innovation quality and resolve apparently disparate innovation directions.

Parallel Innovation is more than just a Plan B - it's actively working on a carefully selected set of solution paths at the same time (without falling into the multitasking trap) especially when the solution space is small and the relative value of diverging paths is difficult to assess.

Deliberately looking for ways to integrate the two paths adds even more value to the approach.

Pattern Thinking

Pattern Thinking is a simple technique for finding the otherwise invisible repeating patterns that drive and constrain the behaviour and performance of complex adaptive systems that make challenging situations seem so intractable.

The basic idea is to list the elements of the situation - like issues and challenges, opportunities and solutions and then, instead of comparing them for and raking them on difference, look for similarities and repeating patterns - they won’t be immediately obvious but very quickly leap into focus.

Pooling Contingency

Pooling Contingency shifts time, resource, equipment and material contingency from tasks to schedule.

The problem with conventional time, resource, equipment and material scheduling (in which contingency is added to each step), is that we seldom benefit when we come in under budget - and always suffer when we come in over budget: so when we lose we lose and when we win, we don't win. Pooling contingency enables us - at the cost of higher frequency communications - to net unders and overs off and reduce costly multitasking.

Power Delegation

Power Delegation is a set of simple frameworks for delegating effectively.

It enables one to calibrate for the situation and delegate skillset and provides a way of delegating both authority and responsibility while maximising the growth in delegate capability and resolving the conflict between freedom and control for both parties.

Prerequisites Technique

Our natural tendency is to think and engineer forwards, getting started as soon as possible to ensure the earliest possible completion. The problem with this is that we risk focusing on things that turn out to be superfluous and missing things that turn out to be crucial.

Surfacing comprehensive sets of successive prerequisites to the ultimate objective enables us to ensure sufficiency while minimising superfluity.

It will do us well to adapt the plan for natural progression forwards as well!

Provisionals Technique

Provisionals Technique is deliberately adopting very rough and of necessity inadequate solutions ahead of any thought or research.

The power of provisionals lies in their creation of a tangible working solution - that is a lot easier to enhance than an ethereal solution that doesn't yet exist.

Provisionals can take the form of a few descriptive words or a rough diagram or barely-working prototype: anything to trigger of the enhancement phase of the innovation cycle.

RAPP Sessions

Frequent Review and Planning sessions to generate and sustain momentum and ongoing improvement.

Professional and even amateur sports people practice nearly every day for far fewer competitive performances - while business people have competitive performances every day and never - or hardly ever - practice.

RAPP Sessions combine assessing progress and planning the next things to focus on and practice.

REMODIFAGI

A more comprehensive version of MODIF for overcoming the seemingly intractable human condition problem of unconscious incognizance:

1. Reverse-Engineered (from the nirvana state)
2. Multi-Option (for quick, reliable selection)
3. Frameworks (to provide both control/predictability and freedom) with
4. Alternative Generation and Integration (to ensure ongoing improvement).

Response Framework

A series of simple questions to diagnose the origin of cognitive dissonance and respond accordingly.

Do you have reservations about:

1. The Goal: what we're seeking to achieve?
2. The Problem: what's holding us back?
3. The Solution we're adopting for the Problem?
4. The Plan: how we'll implement the solution?
5. Your role in the plan?

If so, raise your concerns and present alternatives.

RET (Reverse-Engineering Technique)

Reverse-Engineering (working backwards from instead of forwards to) the ultimate state sought) offers a number unique of advantages.

1. It enables us to ensure that we haven't missed any essential elements out.
2. It enables to exclude the superfluous.
3. It enables us to figure out demanding and complex challenges.

We don't need to abandon Forward Engineering - merely supplement it with RET.

Schedule Buffering

Schedule Buffering applies the Pooling Contingency solution to job-scheduling.

The idea is to provisionally schedule jobs/tasks on a minimum duration estimate (instead of padding the estimates)  - and pool the padding in strategically placed Schedule Buffers throughout the day, week or month.

A key element of Schedule Buffering is to to ensure that people are aware that the schedule is dynamic and are kept informed on things as they change!

Scheduled Catch-Ups

Schedule regular catch-ups with frequent interrupters, to reduce the multitasking cost of frequent interruptions.

Scheduled Catch-Ups also enables people to batch queries, self-resolve, increase and accelerate capability transfer and plan their work better.

The idea isn't to ban ad hoc interruptions but to reduce them. Stress that important and urgent interruptions should be addressed immediately.

Scheduled Interruption Windows

Schedule ideal times for receiving interruptions - ideally at a time most convenient for both you and your interrupters and publish those times as the best times to receive interruptions, stressing that urgent and important interruptions can be made at any time: this is merely for interruptions that aren't quite as urgent.

Schedule these Interruption Windows before and after FocusTimes to enable you and your interrupters to batch interruptions for added performance and capacity gains.

Short-Listing Technique

Short-Listing Technique combines the benefits of Idea Logging and Just-In-Time Scheduling. The idea is to maintain two To Do Lists:

1. A long - comprehensive - list of all of the tasks that need to do completed and
2. A short-list of the tasks that need to be completed in the next few hours or days.

This enables us to keep on track without being distracted or overwhelmed, freeing up prefrontal cortex capacity and improving completion satisfaction.

SDC (Solution Design Criteria)

It's very difficult to maintain focus on a large set of solution requirements in complex situations - and even harder if there are many functions or specialisations involved. It's only too easy to forget the specifics of other functions' requirements in the heat of trying to ensure that one's own requirements are met adequately.

The SDC Solution brings us to define and agree on the full set of solution design criteria upfront, so that we can collaborate in testing each idea against the set - and combining and enhancing solutions collaboratively to meet them.

Staged Evolution

1. Define the current ideal outcome, product, service or state.
2. Define the current state.
3. Develop a very rough 3- or 4-stage migration from the current to the ideal state.
4. Deliver the first stage - only introducing new ideas that reduce risk and accelerate this stage; add other new ideas to an Ideas List.
5. Return to step 1, using the ideas list to enhance the ideal outcome.

Success Mode Discovery

Proactively identifying established or new ways of preventing, overcoming or recovering from foreseeable risks, challenges and failure modes equips us, in advance for early identification and response when things go wrong.

The simple discipline of identifying common tips, tricks, short-cuts, breakthrough solutions and quick recovery techniques not only equips us to respond quickly and effectively when thing go wrong, but it also enables us to design and implement the solution in a way that sets us up to use those techniques.

Systemic SWOT

Instead of targeting specific strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats - or summarising each quadrant, find the repeating pattern across the items in each quadrant.

Next, generate lists ways of capitalising on strengths and opportunities to overcome or negate weaknesses and threats.

Finally find the repeating patterns across the various ways to develop a simple but powerful strategy pattern for the situation.

Task Batching Technique

Batching similar tasks together enables us to reduce the number of mental and physical setups, by having a setup per batch and only tiny setups between items in each batch.

The trick is to work out what items to batch together: same type of activity (e.g. phone-call or email) or same project, product or customer?

Beware the trap of focusing on efficiency to the detriment of throughput - i.e. don’t make the batches too big and end up with a lot of WIP and not enough throughput.

Task Completion Approach

With a little planning and discipline, we can ensure that we complete tasks in a single pass, thereby reducing the number of setups per task.

If we switch between tasks unnecessarily, we suffer a setup hit on each switch, wasting capacity and delaying most tasks.

But, if we rigorously complete tasks in one pass we incur only one setup per task, free up extra capacity and finish most tasks earlier.

Task Segmentation Technique

For tasks that are difficult to complete in one pass (because specific challenges or information requirements emerge only during the task or because they require other parties' contribution), it is worth segmenting those tasks and batch-processing the segments (like determining the necessary information required to complete the tasks).

The trick is to identify, both ahead of time and situationally, that the task is really a mini-project and so could benefit from task segmentation.

Task-Listing Technique

Writing down or typing up the list of tasks for the day or week:

1. Frees up working memory (our brains don't need to store the task list.
2. Frees up prefrontal cortex processing power otherwise required to maintain the list.
3. Makes it a lot easier to optimise the list order.
4. Makes it easier to record progress and stimulate a sense of satisfaction.

TaskStream

TaskStream is for office workers in overload situations, where there are many different tasks, priorities and customers contending for the same limited capacity.

1. Defragmenting Time and Focus - especially batching similar task-types together.
2. Switching from a Complete ASAP to Complete AWAPITA mindset.
3. Time Allocation Planning and Scheduling.
4. Using standard templates and approaches for the various batch-types.

TEASE

TEASE is one of many Improvement Mode Frameworks that identify the improvement dimensions to consider.

Knowing what dimensions of a challenging situation or thing we can improve, enables us to both identify and focus on those dimensions more easily and precisely.

1. Chose which dimensions will have the biggest impact - independently and in concert.
2. Focus the Ingenuity Solutions at each dimension to generate ways of improving it.
3. Fins a combination that works.

Throughput Accounting

Throughput Accounting separates truly fixed from truly variable costs.  This enables us to determine what the monthly Fixed Costs are and makes it easy to derive true monthly Contribution (Sales minus truly Variable Costs).

Graphing true monthly Contribution (Sales less truly Variable Costs) against monthly Fixed Costs gives managers and execs - and most staff members - the most crucial insight and status they need to know to make informed performance-impacting decisions.

TAP (Time Allocation Planning)

We have a tendency to allocate our time, focus and energy to what we can make the most difference to, rather than what will make the most end-to-end difference and to what will relieve the most pain, rather than what will make the most gain.

TAP compares current and ideal time allocation and provides simple techniques for migrating from the current to the ideal. Even small changes to time allocation deliver huge gains in end-to-end performance and fulfilment.

TAS (Time Allocation Scheduling)

In dynamically complex and challenging environments, it's difficult to optimise workflows, because demand is so unpredictable.

TAS determines the amount of time required for the various work-types and creates processing rules for optimising flow for performance and fulfilment.

This enables us add new work times to the relevant work queues asynchronously from actually doing the work, which can then be batched and processed in an optimal way.

TurboMeetings

We tend to structure, lead, prepare for and participate in meetings in a very similar way. There are different types of meetings and each type needs to be structured and approached differently - and can be better optimised for performance, duration and fulfilment if this is recognised.

TurboMeetings identifies a common set of meeting types and optimised ways of running them - including achieving outcomes without holding an actual meeting and extending meeting duration for the sake of better outcomes.

Vicious Cycle Reverser

Some of the most significant contributors to our current reality and the challenges it presents us with are vicious cycles: short-term actions that we have taken in the past that compound rather than overcome the problem and make it increasingly difficult to escape.

IMAGE

The Vicious Cycle reverser is a simple model for deconstructing and consequently reversing the Vicious Cycle, converting it into a Virtuous Cycle.

VLUARA

VLUARA is an acronym for Vicarious Learning Using Animated Representative Avatars.

The basic idea is to create avatars - characters - that represent the different factions within the organisation and situation - and then tell stories and create animations in which the avatars articulate both valid and invalid concerns of their respective factions, so that they can be acknowledged and responded to in a respectful and considered way, to enhance the solution quality and help people get perspective on their stances on critical things.

What 'n By When?

Establish, upfront, what the required
 customer business outcome is – and
by when it's required.

It's only when you really think about it that you realise that our natural tendency - especially in overload situations - is to focus on getting started with what we think the customer wants us to do as soon as possible - instead of making sure that we understand and can negotiate the outcome and due date first - thereby reducing misplaced efforts and unnecessary stress.

WWMMDT

The Fundamental Attribution Error - attributing motive, intent and inferiority to other people's bad behaviour, but circumstances to our own - is one of the biggest and most damaging cognitive biases we face.

WWMMDT ("Wimditty") is an acronym to remind us to ask, "What would make me do that?" - if I was being reasonable and decent.

It's astounding how often, we find that those same extreme conditions that would bring us to behave sub-optimally, exist in their situation.

Xplor

Instead of using open or closed questions, Xplor uses multiple-choice questions, with the option for the interviewee to add their own option or indicate that it's none of the proffered options.

Asking multiple choice plus add your own option questions - and then playing back their own words and repeating the cycle until they agree with the wording - before translating into my own words, brings me to understand their position to both of our satisfaction - before repeating the process for my position.

The Drim Solutions Tree

The Drim Solution Library comprises universal drim solution patterns:

1. For various drim domains and dimensions
2. Applied across a broad range of drim arenas, including, Personal, Organisational, Community, National and Civilisational.

The drim solution patterns serve as templates and buiiding blocks to make things quicker and easier.