The value of Visionary thinking lies in its ability to envision what others cannot yet see and to conjure new solutions to challenges that might otherwise confound others. The ability to have and hold a vision of how things could be (instead of how they actually are) requires a long view and an open, unfettered mind. The development of ideas is often an iterative process which takes shape as the Visionary works to describe their vision with ever greater fluency. This takes resilience as they counter the obvious skepticism. Change is in the Visionary’s nature and they are quickly bored by conformity and repetition. Their great strength lies, in part, in their ability to play with boundaries and ignore others’ rules or expectations of how things should be done. Their true gift is one of passionate communication; they foster a culture of enthusiasm and inspiration.
For you, the importance of MindTime is that it provides you with an entirely new set of possibilities to master yourself, people and situations. The more you experiment with the MindTime Framework the more quickly you will develop a new kind of ability, the ability to foresee outcomes and move things as you imagine they can be moved.
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.
- Flexibility
- Spontaneity
- Opportunities to create and innovate
- Novel and inventive solutions
- Rules and structure
- Conventionality (conventional ideas)
- Status quo
- Being locked in
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 a person who defaults to Future Thinking, we encourage you to learn how to deal with resistance. You are the world's change-makers who can see what's possible and when others can't. You will face resistance in people who default to the Present and Past Thinking Styles, as they seek to mitigate risk, which makes them skeptical about change. The most effective thing to do is learn how to recognize resistance early on and interpret it as "intelligent." When you embrace intelligent resistance, you learn to listen for the Thinking Styles and ask people what they need to move closer to your ideas. You can also move toward their own ways of thinking to ask for their help in progressing your own agenda.
Imagine what you can do when you communicate your ideas so clearly that people with different Thinking Styles are activated and want to be part of the change. Leverage your incredible insight to collaborate with others to move your ideas to validation and then execution – so that everyone can benefit from your ideas as they come to light.
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."
