Hi, Okta from Business team is here 🙋♀️
Every Friday, before we welcome the weekend, we meet with other giftmakers for a study group where we talk about a particular topic. As Tak heard us chatting in Bahasa and all the participants were Indonesian, we held the workshop in Indonesian instead of English last week. To help other giftmakers who don't speak Indonesian comprehend what we talked about in the last session, I'd want to use my blog as an additional source of information.
People were confused when I started my presentation with a black screen; some felt it was a mistake, but it was meant to describe that ideas are rare in the past, just as we live in a dark room and once we have an idea then we will light up the whole room.
Photo by Gilles Lambert on Unsplash
As Tak often said, it's quite easy to find ideas on the Internet these days, and he's right! It's easy to solve a problem by opening Google and typing in the keyword, yet we still feel like we've missed the big idea that is meaningful even though we have unlimited access. In reality, the major idea is already there, but we're blind to it.
It's like when we go outside and we look up at the sky, we immediately close our eyes because they can't withstand the light. I hope this analogy can give you a better picture of what I'm trying to say.
Tak wrote a blog about Why we are "Giftmakers" and call su-re.co as "Think-Do-Be tank".
When we want to give a gift to someone we care about, we can go to e-commerce. For example, we just open Tokopedia or Shopee and find a lot of ideas there. When it comes to making the gift, we cannot say that we lack ideas because there's nothing. In fact, there is something there.
Photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash
If you want to make the gift receiver happy, you don’t ask them what they want. We begin to ask ourselves how we can make the gift special. We start with what we believe to make it unique, authentic, and meaningful! We have to start from our own understanding of what can be a beautiful gift to people. It's our gift! Nevertheless, this is only the beginning.
Verganti on his book said that the act of making a gift is for us, the gift is for the receiver. Just because we love it, doesn't mean other people will love it. That's the basic principle of making a gift.
So if we start from something that we believe in, how we can be sure that we don’t see what only we want to see??
In a nutshell, criticism is the answer. For us to reframe our thinking about anything, we require criticism. By thinking more deeply, we're beginning to perceive things from a different perspective.
“If you just dig straight down vertically, you'll end up in the ditch.”
I quoted from How to shape a vision explained by Prof Roberto Verganti
I honestly still improving my critical thinking skill. Please share in the comment below how do you maintain yourself to be a critical thinker as a giftmaker at su-re.co?
Thank you so much and see you on my next blog😊👋🏽
I remember two weeks before I started my master's degree, I joined all free courses about critical thinking and academic writing. I remember one lesson, a multidimensional perspective will help you to keep asking and looking for the answers. In su-re.co, there are two things, keep reading all chats, email, and Asana help me to know others works and situation, and do anything with a reason, so I will not do 'ticking box' :)
It took me a while to answer. As long as I get myself well-informed because the information might help me (even random news for some people) for other occasions when I reflect on them. And indeed, taking notes is useful for short memory like mine.
I agree with fabian, questioning until I hit the wall. But sometimes it may not be the best approach for me, as I end up with sleepless night. So combining with Tak's approach of writing it down and coming back to it when my head is more clear, is what I do now :))
I wrote a blog about how knowing more makes us tunnel vision. To avoid this, it's important to stop and acknowledge our possible biases, what we think is "common sense" for ourselves and why? By removing the idea of "common sense" we let ourselves be open to accept other thought processes. It's really about questioning why until you hit a wall.
I am natural born critical thinker. But, my PhD process helped me a lot. If you feel strange on something, do not let it go. I write it down it on my notebook