Episode 15: Chapter 14 - Contextual Intelligence Action Steps

Speaker A: I am not afraid. I was born to do this. Joan of Arc. Hello, everybody. My name is Matt Coots, and I am the host of the Contextual Intelligence Podcast and author of Contextual Intelligence how thinking in 3D can help resolve Complexity, Uncertainty, and ambiguity. And welcome to episode 15 of this podcast. Episode 15 gonna be our final episode as we discuss the last chapter in the book Contextual Intelligence, Chapter 14, that highlights 12 specific action steps that you can take to begin to practice contextual intelligence and integrate all the things we've been talking about. Complexity, mindset, synchronicity, tacit awareness, the R4 process, the Christmas ghost of 3D, thinking of hindsight, insight and foresight, and all the different nuances of leadership that we've talked about in the previous 14 episodes. This episode very appropriately started out with a quote from Joan of Arc, who says she was not afraid, but she was born to do this. And I just want to encourage you as a listener that you were born to be contextually intelligent. You were born to be able to navigate an uncertain and complex environment. And sometimes the fear that drives us the most is the fear of initiating something new. And contextual intelligence certainly will require you to initiate something new. And I want to encourage you in the initiation of that new thing. Don't hold on so tightly to what was old and what was former and what used to be successful. Oftentimes, what prevents us from going to the place and getting to the place where we need to be personally, professionally, socially, in our relationships, in our, uh, life, and in all the different facets and phases that we find ourselves is letting go of that complicated based framework of an embracing complexity. It's letting go of how things were so successful for me in the past, or letting go of something that happened to you that just can't seem to get past. And it's really important for us as we delve into these 12 action steps, that we understand that you can, in fact, do this. You may be asking yourself, what can I do right now to improve your Contextual Intelligence? These 12 steps are ways to do that. What's interesting about these 12 steps is they are not sequential. They are not. You need to do this step before the next step. They actually can be implemented in any order that you choose. So as we go through these 12 action steps, pick one or two that resonate with you the most that you can begin to do right now. It may be that you need to review the four obstacles to the logical fallacies that we talked about, go back and review some of the solutions that we talked about in episode 12, which are actually kind of conceptual and also integrated into these steps that we're going to talk about. But it's been my experience that it takes time to disassemble mental models that you have taken years for you to construct. And I want to encourage you, even though I'm going to outline 12 behaviors. These 12 behaviors aren't a panacea. They're not a magic bullet or a silver bullet that if you start right now, they will all of a sudden cure everything that's ever happened and give you a brand new complete mindset. Shift overnight. Remember the things that you've developed, the habits, the heuristics that you've developed, the rules of thumb that you live by, the experiences that you've built, you've been relying on them for a long time. And it's not that we're jettisoning them entirely and saying that those experiences and things are no good. It's just that in order to embrace the new, we need to begin to let go and loosen our GR grip, so to speak, on some of the things that we are so used to holding on to. And that's really action step number one. If you had a pre action step, so to speak, that might be it. And so I just wanted to give that little introduction before we get into these specific action steps. The first action step then is a very practical one, and that's develop a contextual intelligence action plan. Actually make a list. Begin to think about those things as we've talked about in the previous episodes, just again as a quick refresher. Whether it's shifting from a, uh, complicated mindset to a complexity mindset, whether it's integrating hindsight, insight and foresight into your decision making and evaluation of different opportunities that come up. Whether it's the R4 model, whether it's synchronicity, or whether it's the Christmas ghost strategy, whatever it is, outline in writing the specific things that you think you can begin to do right now and develop a plan for through that. The other part here, and this is where I kind of will introduce something to you that I've only mentioned in previous episodes. And that's the Contextual Intelligence Profile. There is a website that you can go to where you can take a 48 item survey that asks you how frequently you do certain behaviors. And then what it does is it automatically calculates for you which of the 12 contextual intelligence behaviors you practice the most frequent, and then which ones you practice the least frequent. And based on the practice frequency of the 12 behaviors. It extrapolates for you how much time you spend in each of the three dimensions of time, how much time and effort you put into or how much time you spend in the area of hindsight, in the area of foresight, and in the area of, uh, insight. And then from that, you can develop a really neat action plan for how to begin to change your thinking or holistically, again, whether you need more hindsight or more foresight or whatever. But then it also gives you the specific behaviors from the 12 behaviors that are limiting your practice of that dimension of time. So let's say, for example, you score a low frequency on foresight. It will tell you that. But then it will also tell you which of the four foresight behaviors you need to begin to practice more frequently to pick that foresight score up. And then it does some other things. It gives you, you a different, uh, graphic representation for the overall 12 for the 3D thinking. And then it also compares you to the national database. So you just get a sense of where you stand relative to everybody else who's taken the profile. So that would be one way to develop an action plan. So if you're interested in that, I'll put the website and the details to accessing that in the show notes, and I hope you take advantage of that. And then you also have the option then to move from there to, if you would like, to some personal coaching options and things like that to help you articulate even more clearly exactly what it is you need with a coaching relationship with me or one of my other certified contextual intelligence coaches. Action step number two is perfect. Your ability to extract lessons and knowledge from every experience. So this is one that I think is also very practical. And it simply requires going back and looking at the valuable experiences in your life and asking yourself, what other lessons can I learn from this experience? So often we learn something from a particular experience, and once we learn something, we move on and away from that experience. One of the things that contextually intelligent people do is they recognize that some of the experiences that they've had have other lessons, but buried in them. And I would really encourage you to go back and consider some of those key moments or key memories in your life and ask yourself not what you already learned and not reiterate something that you've already learned from it. Uh, but ask yourself what else could be taken away from that? What other lesson can you extract? The third action step is to transform your knowledge into wisdom that can be reused in new context. The other thing that people do is they learn a lesson from their experience and then they relegate or even sometimes sequester or even quarantine the lesson from that experience to the context in which it was learned. In other words, you learn something at work, a life lesson at work or a life lesson at home or some other social setting. Maybe it's something you learned at a previous job. And then you only keep that lesson available for you in that space. So when you're looking at solving, solving a problem at work, you only go back to work experiences to try to find something to inform your decision or the opportunity or the assessment, evaluation that you're making. What this action step does. Action step three is again, it helps you go back and think about, well, how does this experience that has nothing to do with work, it happened on a vacation one year when I was a teenager with my family. How does a lesson learned in that context apply to the current situation you're in now? Actually step four then is to act quickly when circumstances and events surrounding your context changes. So just become comfortable with making quicker decisions mean acting more quickly. We still want to always apply what Daniel Kahneman talks about and as system two thinking, which is more a methodical, systematic approach. We don't want to react based on the heuristics until we've evaluated our heuristics. And I think that's really important most of the time. The reason why quick decisions backfire is not because the decision was a bad decision. It's because we don't understand or didn't take time to understand why I'm making the decision that I've m that I'm making. And that's what this action step is really all about. So practice in low stakes situations, making decisions and deciding on behaviors a little bit more quickly, but only after you've evaluated the rules and assumptions that go behind why you are tending to lean in a certain direction over another. I think that's a really important one and that's actually a fun one to do. But it also takes a lot of time in advance. This requires going back and again looking at your experiences and asking yourself the why? Question of why do I believe this way? Or why do I think this is bad, why do I think this is good? Why are these things always something that tends to take me in a certain direction? What is it about this, uh, thing from my history that leads me that way? And you can begin to understand that you can actually begin to train your reflexes instead of your instincts. And that's really what this action step is all about. And even in the description of the action step itself, we distinguish between reflexes and instincts. Most of the time we make instinctual reactions instead of reflexive reactions. And you might say, well, what's the difference? And I think it's important for us to understand that reflexes aren't always a bad thing, especially when they're trained. And I guess that's my point. That's why I say go back and make sure you understand the heuristics that are driving your assumptions. Think of it the same way an athlete would train their reflexes. Human performance situation. You can hone your reflexes, you can sharpen your reflexes, you can quicken your reflexes to do the right thing automatically when it's needed, with little thought process which is different than instincts. I would like an instincts to type one thinking. Those are the heuristics that you just instinctively react to something without knowing why. And that usually backfires. Someone who uses their reflexes isn't so willy nilly with just reacting. They actually have trained for this event. So you need to practice and train yourself in the art of making decisions. So that's what that action step is about. The next action step, Action step five is learn to leverage all five of your senses. Right? So this is something that I think is important. So often, you know, we have five senses so that we can make a, uh, full and accurate assessment of our surroundings. And most of the time when we make a decision or evaluate an opportunity, opportunity, we only use one, maybe two of our senses. This is one way that you can train your reflexes. You can train your reflexes by training all five of your senses to inform something you're doing. And then learning to listen to all five senses instead of one dominant sense is really, really important in this case. So I like to equate it this way. I equate sight being equivalent to four foresight, smell being equivalent to hindsight, touch being equivalent to insight. And then taste helps us distinguish between different opportunities. So that's equivalent to discernment. And then hearing is equivalent to listening and active listening in particular. And when we start to use foresight, hindsight, insight, discernment and active listening and engaged listening, we actually begin to practice all five of our decision making senses. And that way we can get and take in a better picture of what's going on around us before we decide. So be intentional about using all, uh, five of your senses as you are evaluating opportunities and making decisions. Action step six is to balance all feedback. You know, Input means that all perceived info information influences a situation. So we have to understand, you know, that's part of the, the research and understanding the Hawthorne effect and other research phenomena that affect when you observe something, when, when somebody or something knows they're being observed, they will automatically change their behavior. And somebody who is doing the observation automatically alters and manipulates what they're observing just by the fact that they're observing it. We need to be aware of that and balance all of our feedback. So every time we begin to observe something, we have to remind ourselves that the very fact that we are observing something in the external environment or even in our own internal environment, we are altering its natural state. That is absolutely critical to understand and requires a keen balancing of uh, of feedback action. Step seven is simply to look for non linear patterns and outliers. So often we want to believe and we want to think that the world we live in is linear, stable, predictable, non random. And the fact is it's just not those things. So we need to not only learn to be comfortable with non linear patterns or that random things that happen in life, the chaos moments that happen, we also need to learn to, to look for them and understand that these outliers actually drive so much of the things that we decide to do. Despite the fact that we tell ourselves we're ignoring the outliers, we're just simply not. So we need to learn to not only be comfortable with them, but look for the non linear patterns because that's more how life really is. And when we look for the non linear patterns and we look for the outliers, those are the things that kind of indicate the reality of the situation. And when we ignore outliers and we ignore the random aspects of life and decisions, we tend to create a fictional world. And then we make decisions that aren't based on what's really happening. And of course we want to avoid that action. Step eight is to anticipate that outliers will influence the outcome of whatever decision you're making or whatever opportunity you are considering. Outliers cannot be ignored. You have to anticipate that outliers will influence what you're doing and the law of averages and the mean and all those things. When we try to make decisions based on the average person, the average decision, the average market, the average response rate, whatever it might be, the average reaction, we will always miss something important. So we need to, I'm not saying you have to always alter your decision because of an outlier, but you always have to be aware of and anticipate that an outlier will in fact affect the outcome. That also helps you eliminate any surprises. Action step nine is learn to manipulate the future with an action in the present. And this is maybe my favorite one. This is all about your aspirational identity. It's becoming your future self now. It's understanding that you can actually pull the future into the present by acting now how you want to be someday. And I think that's really, really important. It goes with asking yourself the question, what would my future self come back and tell me to do today so that I can be that person? So imagine yourself in the ideal future, the person you want to be, the person you want to become, the person that's high performing, high functioning and great relationships, doing all the things that you want to do, and in great shape, both physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Etc. Imagine yourself in that space five years from now, ten years from now, and then ask yourself, what would my future self come back and tell me to do right now in order to maintain the person that I am in the future? That's really important there. So I would ask you to do that again. That's action Step 9. Manipulate the future with. With actions in the present. Action step, um, 10 is to recalibrate goals and outcomes here. We've talked about this in some of the previous episodes, but I actually love this one because this one helps us understand the difference between goals and outcomes and how important it is that we leverage outcomes instead of goals. Now, I've talked about this before, not only in previous episodes, but in other podcasts that I've done as a guest and as a host. And that's understanding that goals aren't as great as we think they are. Yes, every person needs to have goals, but oftentimes the goals that we have aren't really goals. They're outcomes of something else. For example, peace or communication or stability. These aren't goals per se. These are outcomes of something else. And when you take something that is supposed to be an outcome or that is by nature an outcome and call it a goal, you have to artificially manipulate your environment in order to make it happen. For example, within a healthy marriage, communication is an outcome, not a goal. What tends to happen is people who are in a relationship and say, hey, we need to improve our communication. They make communication a goal and they start to create constraints around how communication needs to happen, right? So they say, we're going to set up time every day to talk and we're going to create these things. And Life happens, and that doesn't always get an opportunity to happen and occur the way we want it to occur, or it feels forced. How was your day to day? Fine. Well, I want more than fine. Well, fine's all I have right now, kind of thing. And creates this environment that's not a natural environment. The mistake that's made is assuming that communication is a goal to attain to. No, no, no. Communication is an outcome of stability, security, safety, intimacy. So those are the things you should be doing. And as you're doing those things, communication becomes a natural outcome of those other things. So this action step is really about understanding and recalibrating the things that you call goals, shifting them from the goal category and asking yourself, are these really outcomes of something else? And if they are, make that necessary shift. Action step 11, then, is about becoming literate and framing the problems of different disciplines. Now, uh, there's a mouthful for you, but I think it's really, really important. We need to become literate in learning how to articulate and explain the problems from a different discipline or a different person's point of view. So on an organizational or departmental or corporate level, it's a discipline issue. A different discipline, a different profession. From an individual level, it's from the perspective of a, uh, different person. How good are you at explaining the problem from someone else's point of view? You have to learn to practice that. And I would do that on purpose every day. Pick a problem that you're dealing with, either personally or professionally or organizationally, and then try to explain what that problem looks like from an discipline or industry that's completely different from yours. Or try to explain it and describe it from the perspective of a person with a completely different background than you. A stranger, uh, who fits none of your demographic profile. Ask how would they describe or explain this problem? And that's, that's a really important skill to be able to do. And you'll find once you begin to do that, you'll start thinking in a contextually intelligent way that you never have before. The final action step is learn to be retroflexive. Now, retroflexion is a powerful concept that describes a change in position without a change in location. You are retroflexive if you're agile enough to turn 180 degrees without losing your sense of where you are. In other words, you can entertain new ideas without compromising your values. As a retroflexive of person, you can see many sides of an issue without losing a sense of what the issue might be about. The Classic example of something that's retroflexive is the way an owl can move its neck. It can maintain its position, but it can look almost in 180 degree difference. You know, it can almost turn its neck. Uh, well, it can turn it 180 degrees, even closer to 360 degrees. Sometimes it can turn completely around. And it's one thing to be facing and positioning a certain direction and then being able to turn and see a, uh, completely new or different vantage point. We need to be mentally retroflexive in that we can take on a different perspective, a different point of view, without losing our true center. This is the whole idea of what tolerance truly is about. It's being able to entertain something or someone that's different than you without losing your position. See, most of the time we're taught, especially in our cancel culture and our politically correct mindset, that in order to be tolerant, you have to fully accept some other position or some other value that you don't hold. And you have to, you have to endorse it and you have to promote it in order to truly be recognized as someone who is tolerant or someone who is non biased or someone who is inclusive. Well, that's completely false and that's actually a ridiculous idea. Someone who is truly retroflexive, truly inclusive, truly tolerant knows how to understand someone else's position, someone else's choices and understand what they are without feeling that they have violated their own sense of values and belief system. And that's really important. And um, and that's what contextually intelligent people can do that other people just simply can't do. They can entertain that diversity of thought clearly without feeling as if they violated something in their own value system. And that's really important. So Those are the 12 contextual intelligence action steps. So that concludes all the chapters in the book. Contextual how thinking in 3D can help resolve Complexity, Uncertainty and Ambiguity. I am your host and author of that book, Dr. Matthew Coutts. I would love to get this book in your hands. And even more than that, I would love to have a conversation with you and, and explore how I can help you, your organization, your department and your team. I have, uh, a litany of different services, including the Contextual Intelligence Profile, workshops, seminars, breakout sessions, train, corporate training events, search notifications. If you're interested in that, please reach out. All my contact information is in the show notes and I hope you have a great and exciting life as you learn to be and become more contextually intelligent. Thank you.