Greggle · Ways of thinking
Fourteen ways of thinkingThese are the methods factories, consultancies and labs have used for decades, the ones normally locked inside textbooks and training courses. Each page says where the method came from, why it works, when to reach for it, and how to run it with a pen. Greggle lays the same method out on your board and walks you through it.
Start with what you are trying to do. Or, before any of them, the knowledge audit: fifteen minutes sorting what you know from what you believe. And after, the decision journal, for finding out whether you were right. Those two are Greggle’s own, and they are in the app as well as on paper.
For a Problem. Something has gone wrong and you need the cause, not the symptom.
Toyota, 1950s
Ask why of the answer, five times, until you reach a cause you can actually act on.
Kaoru Ishikawa, 1960s
The fishbone. Go wide across every kind of cause before you go deep on one.
Eliyahu Goldratt, 1984
Find the one place where the whole flow narrows, and serve it.
For a Challenge, a Project or a Goal too large to see whole.
Greggle’s own synthesis
Categorise the challenges, evidence each one, judge what you can move.
For a Decision, or an Opportunity you have not yet said yes to.
Franklin, 1772
Write down what a good answer would have to do before you look at the answers.
Kurt Lewin, 1940s
What is pushing for the change, what is holding it back, and which single restraint to remove.
For a Project with an end, or a Goal without one.
Amazon, 2000s
Define what done looks like and the evidence that would prove it, then walk back to now.
Intel, 1970s
One objective, and the numbers that would prove you reached it.
For a Risk, or any plan before it starts.
Gary Klein, 2007
It is twelve months from now and this failed. Work out why, then prevent it.
For anything whose outcome depends on someone else.
Freeman and Mendelow, 1980s
Who decides, who can block it, and what each of them actually wants.
Barbara Minto, 1970s
Give the answer in the first sentence, reasons beneath. The consulting habit.
What the eleven kinds are, and how to tell which one you have.
All fourteen are always there, and so are two of Greggle’s own: the knowledge audit, offered first whatever the kind, and the decision journal, last on a Decision. These are the ones the app puts at the top of the list, most apt first.
Greggle proposes the first cut and adds nothing until you have looked at it. No account, nothing leaves your device.
Open Greggle