Structured Thinking
Fragmented information is everywhere; people who can organize it well are something of a rarity.
If I’m attending a class, or listening to someone explain something with a slide deck or any other document, and after twenty or thirty minutes I still can’t hear the main point, the structure, or the logical progression, I find it incredibly uncomfortable. I can’t keep listening, and I pretty much leave.
Whenever that happens, I’m reminded of the importance of [structured thinking].
It applies broadly to people who teach courses or host public livestreams.
I remember how we used to love putting terms like structural, logical, and critical thinking in our résumés or articles. They sounded right and sophisticated, and surely you couldn’t go wrong with them. We had a vague idea of what they meant. Now that I’ve met more people and seen more things, perhaps I’ve finally come to really understand them.
Recently, I’ve even realized that structure and logic don’t necessarily have a strong connection. A professional group we generally expect to be highly logical—programmers, for example—may not actually be that good at structured thinking. Of course, the very best among them still are.
People who lack structured thinking easily get scattered and go off track, jumping from one point to another. They cover countless points without connecting the dots into lines or the lines into a bigger picture, until they forget where they’ve jumped to themselves. The content seems rich, but the audience actually takes away very little. For a teacher, that’s a real disadvantage: somewhat like doing twice the work for half the result.
But people with strong structured thinking always have the overall architecture of points, lines, planes, and volumes in their heads, with or without slides. They know how to lead others toward understanding, one point and one part of the picture at a time. When they branch out, they bring the discussion back to the main thread. In the end, all the points naturally connect and come full circle, all the pathways open up, and the audience has a powerful sense of things suddenly becoming clear and of having learned something. People like this are very well suited to teaching.
They have another trait, too: whatever question someone in the audience throws at them, they can quickly locate the root cause. They immediately know which point in the framework hasn’t been fully understood, trace the question back to that specific point in the structure, and explain the related influences around it. That, too, is a sign of professional expertise.
Thinking about this makes me feel that people who are really good at creating and teaching courses are actually pretty impressive, especially in an age when content is king. Fragmented information is everywhere; people who can organize it well are something of a rarity.
Perhaps I used to underestimate the significance of structured thinking, too. Now I feel that it’s creating a real gap between people.
Especially with the ways organizations and entrepreneurship are taking shape in the AI era, just getting good at this one ability might give you a better chance of success in creating courses, products, or content.