How I reflect - action planning from Leanne Hughes' ConCon.

Doing beats thinking: notes mean nothing until they're turned into actions

I’ve got 12 pages of notes from 2 days with 50 Consultants. The last thing this good was Museum Leadership Masterclass in 2018, and that’s where i learnt how to turn session scribbles into actual outcomes.

Here’s the overview. I avoid jumping straight to actions and build in two intermediate steps:

1. During sessions, i catch all i can. Little sketches, quotes, etc.

2. The next day, I hold open-minded attention and go through my notes and just see what stands out to my mind, my heart and my gut.
   Not overthinking - just grabbing from the buffet.
   Not seduced by the charisma of the speaker, but by what’s in my pages.
   Not thinking what it might mean, yet, just what’s seductive.
   (Last weekend, i did this at the airport / on the plane after a 16km beach walk; for me, some fresh air helps to clear the static and hear the signal.)

3. I look at what i noticed and ask myself what it means to me, right now and for my desired future. I do not go back over the full notes. It’s too overwhelming, and i trust the process of step 2.

4. Lastly, the next day, I turn those meanings into concrete actions. ‘Now, next and later’ is a good framework, as is ‘this week, this month, six months’.

The gaps are really important for me - in the first two my brain runs ahead of my gut, and as per Kahneman’s great book, i have to give my ‘slow thinking’ a chance to catch up. And the structure of step 4 matters because sometimes in the past i broke all the rules of habit formation and did a ‘1 January gym membership’ - flurry of actions, no staying power, failed in a month.

So for me this is what it looks like - i’ver taken 12 pages of notes through 2 intermediate steps and got to a table of actions. Some are little and I’ve already done (allocate recurring outreach and reflection times in my diary) and others i’ve just booked the half-day to do them.

Here’s a concrete example on the whiteboard:

One insight Leanne shared this week was ‘how you do the thing is the thing’. I love a whiteboard - the immediacy, the shaping of thought through space. It’s the one thing on my facilitation rider. Also, I believe that simple methods, actually implemented, beat any ‘Best Practice’ sitting on the bookshelf. (And my whiteboard sketches are reassuringly not polished AI.)

In my notebook from that 2018 Masterclass, there’s this ‘Step 2’ note:

Do the thing. I’m hitting publish now.