What is your Question?

Back in 2006, I and a good friend and colleague (let's just call him Joe for now) came across a robust set of documents by Adam Sicinski. The starting point of this set of documents was a document Adam called 'The Mastermind Matrix.' Adam's work pulled us in due to our interest and use of Mind Mapping as part of our workflow.

So Joe suggested we started a two-person mastermind group where we kick off each session with, ' What's your question? '. We were familiar with Dan Sullivan's work at the time. Dan Sullivan once said..

I had a college professor 40 years ago who said, “Answers are a dime a dozen. What's rare in this world is a really great question. What's yours?”

Dan Sullivan

So the two of us set off to have sessions with at least two more people where we could ask great questions using Adam's work and other subjects we were diving into at any point in time.

Our first group of four consisted of Joe and me, consulting/advising at the Software Architecture level to clients, and two other individuals who were a tad more senior than us. They were consulting/advising at higher levels at more or less the same clients.

Over the years, the group expanded and contracted to at most six people, but it was always Joe and me.

The core topics of our sessions were always :

Systems Thinking - Quality of Thinking .

Software Architecture - The evolving role of Technology.

Knowledge Management - All things Knowledge

Process Management - There is a process tied to everything we do. This happens either consciously or unconsciously.

A couple of months ago, we came across Obsidian, a piece of software that shows excellent potential. It is becoming more popular by the day. That made us aware of The Zettelkasten Method by Niklas Luhmann. So using that in combination with a method described by Dr. Sönke Ahrens in her book, How to take Smart Notes, we both set about populating our Personal Knowledge Management vaults separately.

Separately is the keyword here. It embraces the concept of Emergence in Systems Thinking. My notes reflect my thinking, and Joe's notes reflect his thinking. It diverges and converges at different points, but it stimulates the emergence of entirely different ideas.

From this point onwards, the same applies to your thinking.

This is the first article of a series where I will just 'dump' the notes I am using to populate my PKM vault. To prevent infringement on Adam Sicinski's IP, the notes will only go ONE level down. After that, you can dig deeper into his work on one of the social media platforms.

Thank you for taking the time to read this — next, Concerns + Goals and Identifying your Current Reality.