Here's an idea worth playing with

In this episode of Here's An Idea Worth Playing With, I explore The Art of Noticing — a subtle but powerful skill that can separate effective leaders from the rest. 

Far from being a framework, checklist, or trendy methodology, noticing is about widening your awareness, understanding how work flows, spotting bottlenecks, and observing patterns that matter. And we can develop these skills through creative pursuits.

Discover how creativity trains you to notice what truly matters, frame stories effectively, and make informed decisions that drive impact and productivity in your organisation.

The best leaders aren’t always the loudest — they’re the ones who see, understand, and act on the details that really count.

Check out the blog post, video and photo walk here : https://www.cultivatedmanagement.com/art-of-noticing/

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Creators and Guests

Host
Rob Lambert
I help leaders turn communication into their greatest leadership tool—to build creative, agile, and human-centred workplaces. Through books, courses, consulting and coaching, I guide leaders and managers in using communication to unlock clarity, creativity, and better business results.

What is Here's an idea worth playing with?

Consider this your business, work and personal development ideas lab — bite-sized riffs on communication, creativity, learning, and how to go from idea to value smoothly and quickly.

I help leaders and professionals unlock their personal communication superpower, spark creativity, and release agility to get things done faster, smoother, and with more impact. Through books, workshops, consulting, and coaching, I guide leaders and managers in creating workplaces where ideas thrive, teams collaborate effectively, and results follow.

Bite-sized ideas worth playing with.

Website -- http://www.cultivatedmanagement.com

Rob:

Hi, everybody, and welcome to here's an idea worth playing with with me, Rob Lambert. This is all about leadership and management in today's episode, but it's also about creativity. See, this isn't a framework. It's not a new methodology. It's not some sort of silver bullet.

Rob:

It's not a checklist and it's not some sort of new trendy off the shelf solution. Instead it's something quieter, it's something more internal, it's something creative and it's called The Art of Noticing. Now you may have read the book The Art of Noticing which is a wonderful book and it's one of my recommended books on my reading list over at cultivatedmanagement.com. But today, I'm gonna sort of bring this across to leaders and managers because I think that the best leaders and the best managers and actually the most productive people in an organization and the most effective people are really good at noticing. They notice what's happening around them.

Rob:

They notice patterns. They notice interactions, little signs that something is working and, obviously, signs that something isn't. And then they use those observations to make sense of the business. They build a wider awareness. They use those observations to tell stories, to convince people, to influence, to persuade, and ultimately to guide change.

Rob:

It's that art of noticing that is super important. Now what do I mean by noticing? Well, noticing is about widening your awareness, and I often say that with a wider awareness, you will be surprised less often. How does work move through the organization? Who does what?

Rob:

Who's helpful and who isn't? Who's effective and who's not? How does your work contribute to the value being generated by the organization? How do people come together? What are some of the processes that work and sort of feed this sort of, I guess, this engine of productivity?

Rob:

Good leaders, effective people, they learn how to notice. They get company smart right from the start. And that's one of the 10 behaviors that I often talk about in my 10 behaviors of effective employees. They're learning to notice. They're noticing how the organization actually works, not what's written down in the playbooks or the org charts or some of the other material that you might find in a company.

Rob:

You see in a workplace, the best employees and leaders aren't necessarily the loudest or the busiest. They're the ones with the widest lens. They're the ones who notice. They're the ones who study how workflows, where the bottlenecks are, who helps, who doesn't, and how stuff actually gets done. So how do you practice this art of noticing?

Rob:

Well, there's lots of different ways. You know, I often talk about stapling yourself to work metaphorically, please. No physical stapling. And following it through its journey, maybe even going all the way from an idea in the business or some demand in the business all the way through the process until you receive or release that value. Staple yourself to it.

Rob:

Map that journey. Gather people around. Look for bottlenecks, problems, delays, opportunities to make that process better. It's a really powerful way of doing essentially basic process improvement. Learn to spot some of the levers of change, and I've done a post on this.

Rob:

You can find that in the show notes. There are sort of five or six cluster areas where there's some massive levers. Basically, you you pull a small lever and you make massive change. Now some of those areas, things like processes, like delays, but also communication. Where does it break down?

Rob:

What gets lost? Where do things go missing? Where do people not know what it is they're supposed to be doing? In other words, where do you not have clarity? Because without clarity, you're never gonna get alignment and the right action probably won't happen.

Rob:

But actually, I found one of the most important and powerful ways to generate this skill of learning to notice is outside of work in creativity. It comes from learning an artistic craft of some sort. You know, that could be painting. It could be drawing. It could be poetry.

Rob:

You know, in my case, it's photography. You see, when you practice an art, whether that's drawing, writing, making films, painting, you're training yourself to notice, to study, to capture something about the world and turn it into something new. And so for me, that clearest analogy is photography. The more time I spend with my camera in hand, the more I develop this skill of noticing. I start to see things I'd normally miss.

Rob:

I pay attention to things that I normally wouldn't if I wasn't out trying to take photos. You know, the kind of way that the sun hits a particular wall or the way that flowers are bending in the wind or the way that certain people move through time and space. You start to notice these things. You notice these small details that actually can be quite powerful. They sort of almost bring in a story to life.

Rob:

And maybe most importantly, I noticed myself. What do I choose to include in a frame? What do I choose to leave out? And what story am I actually trying to tell with this picture? Those are the same questions that leaders ask every day.

Rob:

What's important here? What should we ignore? And how do we frame the stories so people could see clearly what matters and then align around that so that we can get good, productive, meaningful, and workplace enriching work done. Now I always say that there are way more problems and opportunities in an organization than we can ever realistically tackle. And this art of noticing allows you to notice the ones that have the biggest impact, to notice those problems that if you resolve them would open swathes of opportunity and productivity for you and your teams.

Rob:

Learning to notice the things that really work and doubling down on them and learning to say no to something else. Like photography, we take a picture and we put stuff in the frame, but naturally when we put things in the frame, we're putting a whole load of stuff outside of that frame too. So what's important? What story do we wanna tell? And that's why I believe that creative practice isn't just a hobby.

Rob:

It's actually training for leadership and being effective at work. Because when you bring this skill back into the workplace, the parallels are obvious. You study how work is really constructed. You notice where the flow slows down or speeds up. You notice which behaviors help and which behaviors hold people back.

Rob:

You pay attention to the system of work, not just the tasks within it. When you do that, your ideas about change carry more weight. They're not based on guesswork or slogans. They're grounded in things you've seen, evidence. You're able to study and dig deep on something that is interesting, that is in that frame, something that is worth following.

Rob:

But it also changes how you see people. When you notice how colleagues interact, you're better placed to put the right people in the right place with the right behaviors. You can tell stories about work that others recognize because they're rooted in what's really happening because you're noticing it. So for me, leadership is deeply connected to the art of noticing. You're noticing what's happening.

Rob:

You're choosing what to exclude. You're drawing a frame around what's meaningful. Now I'll admit, I may be taking this photography metaphor and stretching it a bit too far, but the next time you're out walking with a camera or with your phone or even just walking around on your commute to work, try paying attention to what you notice. How do you choose to frame it? What story are you telling?

Rob:

And then ask yourself, how might that same skill help me lead more effectively at work? If you'd like a slightly more in-depth version of this and to see the video of me doing a photo walk around Winchester explaining this, as well as some sort of hints and tips on how to use photos for creative inspiration, then head over to cultivatormanagement.com. Check out the link in the show notes. And with that, thank you so much for listening, and I look forward to speaking to you in the next episode of Here's An Idea Worth Playing With.