Nutshells are important to Zoom Thinking. (Actually, Nutshells could make a nice book title…). So let’s see if I can give you the whole process in one short blog post. We’ll break it down to 5 steps:
1. CAPTURE. This is where you gather all the information, ideas, questions and miscellaneous stuff relevant to the thinking project—what I call the data mass. The key to this step is NOT to organize and NOT to prioritize, just gather the material in one place.
2. CATEGORIZE. Now you sort the data mass by grouping it under headings. The key to this step is to let the data generate the categories, rather than forcing it under pre-existing headings.
3. PRIORITIZE. So far the data mass appears in the sequence it came to us—now we need to establish an order of priorities. The key to this step is to create a logical chain out of a random cluster of category headings.
4. CONDENSE. Here comes the nutshell, reducing the entire thought field to two or three words. The key to successful condensation is steering between over-generalized and over-specific, so that you capture the unique essence in a few words.
5. CREATE. All the preceding steps are simply deck-clearing. They “calm the information” so you can make creative leaps confident that you have a firm springboard underneath.
Now you have the entire Zoom Thinking process in 5 short steps, I can close this blog and retire… Except that I can’t. Each step entails a multitude of skills, some obvious and some quite subtle. Zoom Thinking is like playing a musical instrument. What we’ve got in the 5 steps is a score for your basic scales. It takes knowledge, practice and artistry to come up with a beautiful composition.