I love to share what I learn and hope this story can help you unlock your own genius then take it up to the top level by making it simple.
Over recent months I’ve been working with a leader to develop a strategy for their business, a very large organisation with oh so many “moving parts”. Through many calls we have taken lots and lots of time to talk through many of these “moving parts”, then ultimately the process of drafting a document began a few weeks ago. The first draft of the document was long and in-depth, with the client pulling together a wealth of knowledge, understanding, research into a detailed document covering a lot of territory. However, despite the depth this already went into, I encouraged the client to keep writing, to get all of their thoughts down on paper. You see, I have learned that by writing we discover our thoughts, as I wrote about here, inspired by this quote:
Expert writers don’t try to put their thoughts in writing. It’s the opposite that happens. They discover what their thoughts could be by writing. Now, it’s not a mystical phenomenon — those thoughts are already somewhere in you. But you are unable to think about them or to formulate them, without going through the writing step. It’s a funny phenomenon to experience. You pay attention to something that strikes you as interesting, you try to put into words this vague impression you have, and you find yourself unfolding, word after word, an observation that is much richer than the initial insight that got you started. After going down that path again and again, and seeing how what you ended up writing is systematically better than what you wanted to write about, you get into the habit of writing, just to know what you are thinking.
Remi Guyot
With that encouragement to keep writing, something quite magical happened in the last week with an iteration of the document. Something “popped” out from the client “writing to develop their thoughts” that reminded me of Einstein’s five ascending levels of intellect (as per the diagram above). This client was already operating at a very high level. Smart, Intelligent, and yes, even Brilliant. However, what sparked from them with this document was absolutely a stroke of Genius. Very rarely have I seen something like that “pop” out of a process like this at such a high level!
As you can tell, I was really excited, but then the next level was the toughest, the final level, to go from their stroke of Genius into making it Simple. Now, this is a topic I am very passionate about, as you can see from the many further post links in my post: “Einstein’s five levels of cognitive prowess“, so I felt I could add value to this process to shift the client from writing more and more now that doing this had unlocked the Genius idea that was going to add so much value to their business.
Once I realised that I could help them make it Simple, what did I do? I read that latest iteration of the document early in the morning, then I took a few hours out from it, including going for a long walk to a coffee shop with a friend. I then decided to do something I rarely do for clients, I sat down and “redlined” the introduction, using their words and removing everything but what needed to go in the first two pages of the long document, then painting the initial brush strokes needed to fine-tune their genius idea. We then got on a call to review it. They immediately felt real clarity that they could then take time themselves to yes, go for a walk, then to bring the simplicity it needed for the final version.
In closing, I know you can tell how energised I am by this story. I love my work, it helps me live my purpose of #MakingPotentialPossible. I also love to share what I learn and hope this story can help you unlock your own genius then take it up to the top level by making it simple.