Whether you’re an executive, manager, professional, or entrepreneur, you need to think ahead. When you do it in a formal sense, it’s called it planning, when you do it informally it’s something like speculating.
Whether you’re planning or speculating, the exercise rep- resents just the tip of the iceberg. For the plans or scenarios to amount to something, they have to be implemented. In turn, that usually involves other people.
Which takes us to the subject of communication: How do you convert those ideas in your head into instructions or position papers or even real plans?
I recommend writing, as in the sense of spending at least a few minutes to put the ideas to paper. Several benefits come out of the writing process:
First, you’ll force yourself to clarify what you’re doing and what you want others to do. As long as an idea remains in our heads, it’s not made accountable, so to speak. That is, we don’t subject our ideas to rigorous scrutiny when they’re just thoughts.
But, when we write out an idea, the strengths and weaknesses show up rather quickly; we force ourselves to look at the...