I've shared the concept of a continuum before.
If you want to unlock a completely new perspective on what you're working on and help you "zoom out", read on š¤
This is one way I thought to capture the "way I perceive" things which bring clarity, vision and strategy to the projects and people I serve.
Like with all things, over time, iāll have an opportunity to explain it better and differently.
Right now you're potentially working on numerous projects.
Take a blank piece of paper (physical or digital) and write one project down and draw a box around it.
Add another few projects that perhaps are running concurrently to the right of your initial box depending on when they may finish or how urgent they are.
Now draw a line underneath the boxes. Take a step back, look at what you've drawn. what do you notice first? Most likely, it is the projects with the boxes around it - great!
Now, draw lines connecting each project box to a point on the line underneath.
Now what do you notice? do we have a makeshift "timeline?
Ok. Simple enough, whatās the big deal?
Letās look at it one more time: What's the thing covering most of the page?
It's not the line, or the boxes - itās the white space!
So. If you could contemplate what is "empty" about the page, you might realise that everything you generated on the page started from "empty". In fact, what you're doing is generating a reality from nothing, or capturing "moments in time".
I'm asking you to reconsider the "empty" (and therefore infinite) as your base. From that base you've drawn on the page and captured āmoments in timeā that have context and meaning to you. This is how we build a web of perception in our minds, it is about correlations and context.
So if you can have a play with this in your mind: seeing the white space as the baseline and the content youāve drawn as creation from that baseline, you might just have an "aha!" moment.
Hopefully, the context of your projects are re-framed, your brain's pattern recognition switches and focuses on the continuum rather than the moments in time, the possibility rather than the realised, and getting a glimpse into what might "come next".
This is what allowed me to develop the Future Framework for Legal Practice. It is the ability to zoom in AND zoom out: to see the detail and complexity of what is being built (zoom in) against where it sits on a continuum (zoom out).
Done to varying degrees of granularity, and depending on the conversation or value I'm looking to impart on someone else, it is always there and has been honed in with discipline.
This exercise in divergent thinking hopefully helps you to realise not only what you are doing in this āmoment in timeā, but with sequential āmomentsā gain the ability to āzoom outā. As a final thought: we must recognize that in order to be most valuable (whether Lawyer or Legal Tech, Institution or Regulator) we need to be concerned with the exigencies of the age in which we live.
I'm always interested in your feedback about how this exercise served you, so let me know (just hit reply) if this helped you or you got an "aha!" moment about the project you're working on (it will make my day š).
As always, the future of law is in our (perceived) hands š„
Q.
Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash