by: Bill Richardson, Q3 2006

For you as a project manager, the subject is engaged thinking and the audience is your team, your stakeholders including your sponsor and hopefully even yourself. By engaged thinking we mean someone who is paying attention to their natural human tendencies for patterned recognition, susceptibility to bias and the powerful influence of emotions. Think of each these three oriented to either the future, the present and the past. Patterned recognition is literally your brain identifying what your next step should be in the future based on the patterns it has seen. Emotions live in the present and influence how you interpret things right now and can be positive or negative. Your biases have a history and reinforce and feed off their mental ancestors. They are clearly from the past.


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