** Business Book Awards 2023 Finalist **
‘A really powerful book.’ – Bruce Daisley
Simple tools, extraordinary results.
Everything we’re learning about how we function best as humans in the digital age is pointing towards one of our oldest technologies: the pen and the page.
Exploratory writing – writing for ourselves, not for others, writing when we don’t know exactly what it is we want to say – is one of the most powerful and lightweight thinking tools we have at our disposal. It’s also been, until now, one of the most overlooked.
But the world’s most influential leaders are increasingly using the techniques in this book to support the key skills of the 21st century – self-mastery, creativity, focus, solution-finding, collaboration – and so can you.
Alison Jones has been helping business leaders identify and articulate what matters over a 30-year career in publishing and as a coach. The founder of Practical Inspiration Publishing and host of The Extraordinary Business Book Club podcast and community, she is passionate about the power of writing to change ourselves and the world.
Cuprins
Introduction
Part 1 – Why exploratory writing?
The science
Is this about better writing?
Let’s get started
Part 2 – The toolkit
Exploratory narrative
freewriting
mindfulness
chimp management
empathy
Metaphor
surfacing metaphors
finding new metaphors
forced metaphors
analogy
Inquiry
learning through inquiry
inquiring of future you
appreciative inquiry
humble inquiry
Visual thinking
writing into drawings
storyboarding
graphic organizers
developing your own visuals
Part 3 – Using the tools
Wellbeing and mindfulness
sense-making
mental resilience
happiness
self-coaching
Clarity and focus
decluttering
focus and deep work
reflective practice
Creativity and problem-solving
creative thinking
problem-solving
prototyping
Leadership and collaboration
visioning
uncovering bias
conflict resolution
culture change
Conclusion: over to you
Appendices: glossary of tools, list of prompts, bibliography
Despre autor
Alison Jones is a publisher, podcaster, speaker and book coach, founder of Practical Inspiration Publishing and host of The Extraordinary Business Book Club podcast. She worked as an editor and publisher with leading companies such as Chambers, Oxford University Press and Macmillan, most recently as Director of Innovation Strategy at Palgrave Macmillan until she left to set up her own publishing imprint. Through her training and coaching programmes she enables business leaders and entrepreneurs to deepen their thinking and communicate more effectively, using their writing to build a platform for their expertise and business success. A champion of the value of books for businesses, she is a former Head Judge of the Business Book Awards in the UK and recommends and reviews business books for the thousands of subscribers to her weekly newsletter. She has written and edited several books, including This Book Means Business (2018) and Exploratory Writing (2022), speaks regularly at industry and business events (she has twice chaired the London Book Fair’s Quantum conference), and regularly contributes articles on business books and business writing to press and other publications. In 2022 she delivered a TEDx talk, ‘Let’s Rethink Writing’.