One of my favorite movies of all time is Bull Durham. One of the lines that I love is "don't think, it only hurts the team". Crash Davis isn't telling Nuke to not think. He is trying to focus his thinking on the important things. In other words - don't overthink or try to think for everybody.
In our current world of being over-busy, overthinking is the biggest problem. Because we don't find the time to focus and center, we try to think of everything. We ask the same question repeatedly and give suggestions that don't fit the purpose because we are moving too fast.
I recently had a project where we wanted to survey members of a team. The goal was to find out what they liked most about working on the team so we could explain that to potential candidates. However, the person I was working on the survey questions with was too busy (not his fault). He would constantly suggest we add a question or an element. They weren't bad suggestions - but they were inappropriate for what we wanted to accomplish. I had to constantly push back and remind him of the goal.
Just like Nuke overthinking was making things difficult for the team, the busy person who can't focus on the goal of the project makes things difficult for the team.
The overthinker? They will find that by focusing, they actually create less work for themselves and the team and get less busy. It's a strange little circle, but it happens every time.
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