Chapter 4

The Thunderbolt Thinking Model:
What It Is and How It Works

Think of the name--Thunderbolt Thinking! Flashes of insight that transform your options, keeping you from getting stuck, while refreshing and recharging your thinking to produce powerful results. What words come to mind? Exciting? Shocking? Electrifying? Enthusiastic? It's not a passive name or a passive model. The Thunderbolt Thinking Model is deliberate; it hits you. Its basic principle is the conscious search and drive for effective thinking--the purposeful quest for ideas, solutions, or suggestions that will produce the breakthrough results you need in order to answer your questions, solve your problems, and meet tomorrow's demands, today. The Thunderbolt Model is ambidextrous; it combines various elements, including:

• Whimsical and reality-based thinking
• Exhilarating and constricting idea generation
• No-holds-barred and pull-in-the-reins brainstorming
• Limitless and rule-bound setting of criteria
• Extraordinary and conventional alternatives
• Silly and serious assumptions
• Outrageous and straight-line scenarios
• Daring and cautious patterns
• Action-oriented and bottom-line results

The Model: A Flash of Insight

Since the mid eighties, I've worked with organizations to help them think more effectively. The flash of insight I had was combining WHAT and HOW with the SPIRIT. What I wanted to do was craft a tool to help you and others think on purpose so you could blast through the rigid walls of traditional thinking, feel safe when you "stepped out of bounds," and cause enough of a shift so effective thinking would emerge from your home, workplace, or community.

In the model, three components blend together: WHAT you need to think about, HOW to think, and your SPIRIT, the heart of the model. It's a people-powered model that brings minds together and transforms them. The Thunderbolt Model reinforces the incredible potential of a group--the combined energy of their brains. The most powerful changes on this planet are caused by people. Everything comes back to people. Technological, economic, and political trends spring from a moving "people force." It is people who create and solve the problems; it is people who shape change. The Thunderbolt Model incorporates people into each of its three components by focusing on WHAT people need to think about, guiding HOW people think, and awakening each person's SPIRIT to drive the process.

This simple matrix, with the extra element of SPIRIT, makes the model a viable tool you can easily use so that you can meaningfully answer the signals and shift your thinking. Each part of the Thunderbolt Model has its own distinct function:

• WHAT you need to think about focuses you on your current need, issue, problem, or situation, directing you toward the content you should be considering.
• HOW to think guides you to think differently, to think on purpose, to be aware of the power you have to direct the thinking of yourself and of others.
• SPIRIT, the heart of the model, recharges your thinking and strengthens the WHAT and the HOW by blending five critical ingredients into the process to accelerate the group's thinking, producing outcomes that move from good to extraordinary.