The value of the Leader’s thinking lies in its ability to let go of the plan that was and see the one that needs to evolve. In other words, this thinking strategy is flexible and responsive to an ever-changing world. Leaders are masters of thinking outside the box. This is because they often play with boundaries, seldom choosing to walk or live within them. While they are careful to not ‘upset the apple cart’, at least not too often, they are always looking beyond the known, accepted, or planned for, strongly drawn to new opportunities unfolding in real time. Leaders often change their plans and invest themselves in pursuing these new emerging opportunities. They do so ever mindful of available resources, although ‘scrappy’ execution is often how they get things done. Their true gift is the ability to integrate 'the status quo' with what comes next; they foster a culture of dynamic and yet organized change.
For you, the importance of MindTime is that it provides you with an entirely new ‘system-level’ map to understand yourself and manage people and situations with. The more you develop your abilities at using the MindTime Framework the more powerfully you will manifest your vision.
Your Thinking Style, by which we mean how and why you do just about everything you do, is the result of your specific blend of the three perspectives of time — Past, Present and Future. Each of time’s three perspectives gives rise to certain specific kinds of thinking.
To visualise this blending of time’s perspectives we created a map. And, like all maps, it is a very useful tool.
That golden dot represents you in the MindTime Map of the World of Thinking. The information presented closest to your location details your Thinking Style. This particular MindTime map is about thinking strategies. Thinking strategies are our go-to ways of interpreting information and looking at the world around us. We provide you with several more insights maps later in your report.
We use the MindTime Map as the central tool to convey information about different aspects of thinking. Thinking strategies are just one of many layers of information that can be shown on the map.
Before we start to describe the thinking qualities that arise in your location on the map, you might be interested to understand a little more about what time really is. Time has far more to do with how you ‘do’ your day-to-day life than you can imagine — and we’re not talking about clock time here, but Time in the big sense of the word — temporality — mind. Time is what all of your thoughts are built on and from. Everything you do begins with a thought and everything you think is thought in time, not in physical space. How you blend these powerful perspectives of time defines you, your core needs and motivations. These, in turn, create and inform your every priority in life.
It is time that provides us with the ability to imagine a future, remember a past and engage in a present, and you will learn in this report that how you blend these defines your individuality.
As we pointed out above, the 3 perspectives of time — Past, Present and Future — gives rise to how your thoughts are formed. In turn, this blending of the 3 perspectives gives rise to your core needs and motivations which then shape: your emotions; your core values; your personality; and, all of your personal experiences, and what others experience of you. Let’s add general descriptive adjectives to the map and you’ll see that they describe you.
The words closest to you are the ones that most describe your thoughts and behaviours, the further away they are the less they are likely to resonate with you. And, because it is a complete map of all possible Thinking Styles, your friends, colleagues and family members are also to be found somewhere on this map.
Where in the map do the people in your life, be they colleagues or family, stand? Are they near you or in a different location altogether? What value can they bring to you and you to them?
We are all different from one another to some degree in the way we think and form our point of view. The MindTime Map helps bring into focus the reason why we have our differences in life and the way we go about doing things. It concretizes the abstract for us, promoting a shared understanding of what is really going on and giving us a common language to use to talk about our differences in productive ways.
- Exciting opportunities
- Open-ended projects
- Opportunities to make a difference through action
- Flexible processes
- Researching
- Detail-oriented tasks
- Rigid thinking
- Getting bogged-down with facts
The true value of understanding your Thinking Style is that you will then understand your deepest drives and needs and hear everyone else’s points of view more easily:
- Points of view are the result of our individual ways of thinking
- Everyone has value to bring with their point of view
- What seem to be differences between us are actually our individual ‘takes’ that all arise from one thing, our relationship with Time
- Saying ‘from my point of view’ is like saying ‘using my Thinking Style’
We all need security, stability and possibilities. Depending on who you ask they will rank these needs in a different order of priority. This seems intuitive enough. What is perhaps less intuitive is that the reason why people rank them the way they do is driven by exactly the same motivating drives that shape the way they communicate, learn, grow trust, engage with other people and in their work. It is how we develop our individual point of view on the world around us. The MindTime Framework shows us how and why we think and behave the way we do.
Here is the degree to which each of these three perspectives influences your thinking:
This core need is responsible for:
How much Risk you tolerate (the higher the number the LOWER your tolerance)
How much Time you need to digest and internalize new information (the higher the number the more time you need)
How much Information you need to feel like you understand the risks (the higher the number the more information you need)
This core need is responsible for:
How much Chaos you tolerate (the higher the number the LOWER your tolerance)
How much Organization you need in your affairs (the higher the number the more organized you need to be)
How much you Invest yourself in security and long-term stability (the higher the number the more you invest)
This core need is responsible for:
How much Change you are comfortable with (the higher the number the greater your comfort)
How much appetite you have for pursuing Opportunity (the higher the number the more opportunities you seek)
How much Resilience you have for coping with adverse conditions (the higher the number the more resilience you have)
Your Thinking Style is responsible for many of your innate tendencies, the ways you go about doing life. Here are two layers of information laid on the MindTime Map of Thought. One is about how you approach learning and the other points towards the kinds of things that stress you.
In the book Why You Are You that you can download at the end of this report, you will find useful tables with lists of adjectives and other words and concepts which typify the characteristics attributable to each location on the map. These are very useful guides for how you can adjust your thinking when communicating and collaborating with people who have differing Thinking Styles from you.
As someone who defaults to Future and Present Thinking, you are able to harness the full power of ideas and transformational change. You can see what's possible, while also thinking about what's needed to put those ideas into practice within the context you're in. This is unique to your Thinking Style and is an opportunity for you to bring to teams in deliberate ways. There is no team or situation on the face of the earth that doesn't benefit from the mixture of these 2 Thinking Styles put together.
As the archetype name suggests, being a Leader allows you to generate ideas and manage the execution seamlessly. You are comfortable with 2 of the 3 steps of the Wheel of Collaboration and when you work with people who love to validate data, you create a dynamic combination for a team. Leverage and harness this power in order to effect transformational change in teams and organizations that have succumb to an arthritic way of being.
To become more skilled at amplifying the value you bring, please join us for workshops on the Thinking Styles as thousands of people have done since April 2020. It is the first step in the Human-Centric Leading journey through which we can reclaim our humanity in the workplace.
We also encourage you to learn more about Thinking Styles by reading "The True Power of Time" book.
You can learn about yourself and the fact that your thinking is only 1/3 of your mindset by reading "The Human-Centric Leading Mindset' Toolkit."
