Focus - Techniques

                                              Boby Thomas - 23 - 04 -2009

Recently I was attending one management training. They talked about few techniques which can be used to get good results. I was thinking about it and I could see that many of the management techniques are indirect manifestation of some technique which we are all well versed of. For example - importance of focus. We all know the importance of focus in our daily life. There are many books talking about staying focused. But some times, giving messages indirectly works well than directly passing the messages. So rather than saying you need to be focused on your task, they use indirect methods and techniques to bring in focus. I was thinking about focus and different indirect  management techniques used to bring focus.

Since I am from software background, first example, as you guess, is from a software scenario. I had attended one training on software reviews - "Software reviews for expert". Training was taken by a German guy who has doctorate in software reviews. He talked about a technique called "Perspective based review". In this technique, what you need to do is, find out many potential direct or indirect users of the subject under review and ask separate individuals to assume that they are that person and carry out a review. For example, if you are reviewing requirements document of a software controlled burglar alarm, you can say following are potential direct or indirect users.

• House owner.
• Security officer.
• Policeman.
• An old man who uses the system etc.

Now identify four people to carry out review, ask them to put own the show of each of these individual and ask them to see if all requirements are covered for you. House owner will have many questions in his mind like features, price, upgrading, replacing etc. Security officer will consider possibilities to break, hack and how secure the system is. Police officer will consider how information can be passed to central location in case of theft etc. Occupants will consider how easy it is to use in case they find a threat etc. So end of the day, we will get many inputs from different angles covering wide range of perspectives. If you would have asked someone to review it, they might most probably focused on one or two aspect. But the coverage will be much more here. What actually they did here is brought focus to a small task. When we are focusing on small task, it is very easy to do it and possibility of error is less. And collective effort of all small individual tasks will give a better quality product.

There are management technique called "Six Thinking Hats" by Edward de Bono. This technique explore different perspectives towards a complex situation or challenge. You can read more about this technique here. What are they trying to achieve here? They are doing the same thing. Bring focus to a small task which finally constitute one part of the bigger task.

There is no doubt that focus will bring better results. There are so many technique used by management gurus to bring focus without explicitly specifying the purpose behind it. So these techniques which indirectly bring focus also will yield you good results. After all what matters for us is the end result.