You know what there’s a lack of? Advice on the fly.
In the shuffle to become more politically correct, we’ve child-proofed the world instead of world-proofing the child (so to speak) and seem to have disallowed casual advice. The kind you get when you mention something to someone and get an immediate response from a third party on how to fix a perceived problem.
What’s the deal here?
Partly, we’ve become overly sensitive to innocent contribution. Offering advice is part of conversation. Partly, though whether this is a cause or a result is debatable, we’ve gotten really bad at hearing advice for what it’s worth.
I keep a little black book – OK, it’s Evernote rearing its head again – where I store all the advice I get. Whether I think something’s worth applying to a current situation, I’ve come to realize all advice has value, if the right semantics can be applied to it. If you come to accept that all advice is offered from a position of perceived benefit, then there’s no bad advice (except when it’s given on purpose) and that you might be able to apply just about any tidbit you get to a situation eventually.
One of the big deals with problem solving is building a tool kit (or a toolbox) and gathering better ideas. Being able to see clearly the merit of a piece of advice situationally can be one of those little secret weapons for any thoughtwrestler – gathering large banks of creative ideas from vastly different perspectives.
What are you doing to take advantage of – or encourage others to take advantage of – those tiny tidbits of information we all toss at each other? Or, what are you doing to increase the amount of tidbits you have available?
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Ian, how do you track these different bits of information? Keywords? Separate documents? Folders? I think that retrieval would be a key requirement.
In my opinion, the main reasons why some people don’t give advice on the fly are:
- They don’t want to look stupid.
- They don’t want to make things worse.
- They don’t want to be sued.
- They don’t want to do it for free.
I’d agree with all your reasons, Mark – and with the question about retrieval.
I keep copious amounts of notes as a general problem solving tool. My memory is shaky at the best of times, so having paper (or, in most cases notes on my BlackBerry or through Evernote) helps me collate at least a few days’ worth of information at a time. A lot of this becomes blog posts – actually, it’s one of the reasons I started blogging, to create a searchable record.
Nice piece, I especially like the bit about child-proofing the world instead of world-proofing the child.
As for keeping track of stuff, I have long been the type to write down ideas on scraps of paper and find them later or put them in a physical folder relevant to whatever project they might be pertinent to. This particularly happens with fiction writing or comics work.
For more business-oriented stuff I am a big fan of 37Signals’ Highrise, a CRM application that allows you to create a list of contacts, make notes about them, to-do lists and so on. My typical day involves checking my Highrise to-do list either on the computer or my iPhone and seeing what I should try to have done today, tomorrow, this week, etc.
Ditto, re “the bit about child-proofing the world instead of world-proofing the child”)…
Seems like we’ve come to a place where we want to know the “ROI” before we take any action, and where the value of “casual wisdom” (as I like to call it) must be proven six ways from Sunday before we are willing to look for value in it. Risk adversion? But risk is the only route to discovery.
I don’t keep track of everything, but I do track a lot of it. I’m terrible, however, at doing it in an organized way. When I do attempt it, often using some available tool, I tend to eventually neglect it. That is more personal flaw than anything else.
Currently, though, I am using Google docs to track some items.
I’m glad you pointed out the importance of context and perspective on “advice.” And Mark’s points about why some people don’t give it are bang on. If there is a problem with advice it’s in that context/perspective area. When something doesn’t work, many of us blame some advice we’ve received — a kind of blame deflecting response.
That’s a part of it – some advice may be in the wrong context “at the moment” or may become useless out of the moment’s situation. It’s the drop-off in offering it anyway, even knowing (and sometime saying that it’s ok) it may be rejected.
[...] Advice on the Fly. [...]
What a creative and unusual approach to advice! I love the perspective that advice is mostly offered from a place of “perceived benefit”. So, whether you act on it or store it for the future, you’re recognizing it’s value. Interesting…
Glad you liked it!