Thinking in different ways

When I was a kid, I would often speak up and either be ignored or have my ideas shut down. After a while of this happening, I began to believe that my ideas weren't of much value and stopped speaking up. Instead, I became a thinker and would only speak up after thinking deeply about a problem. This was often too late.

After leaving school, however, decisions were no longer insignificant and often affected the outcomes of a project. It left me in a predicament. Even if I could see the bad decision being made, I would not say it so that I could spend the time thinking. I saw many decisions I didn't agree with end up being the wrong ones. Sometimes it didn't matter, but quite often it did.

Early on in my career, I considered this to be a polarising decision. I was right, and they were wrong. It was black and white. When this happened over a period of time, I decided that holding back my thoughts didn't help the outcomes, and thus I quite assertively started expressing my opinions. I almost went to the other end of the spectrum where I would express my opinion quickly, sometimes without thought. Luckily, I was right more often than not, but on the few occasions that I wasn't, it definitely hurt my pride.

It taught me to consider my thoughts and decisions a bit more, but my delivery was pretty assertive. It wasn't until 2020-ish when a technical leader of an organisation I was at taught me a valuable lesson in being pragmatic. My idealist worldview had led me to believe that there is only one way, and he taught me that there is often more than one way and we shouldn't be held to the right way.

It's served me well over the last few years and was a major turning point in how I decide how systems should be built.

Over the last few years, I've had the benefit of that mindset and had the ability to make decisions that I believed were right, but for the system they were designed for, not for perfect circumstances. Fortunately, at the same time, I was exposed to the concept of "disagree and commit". This also allowed me to voice my opinion that differed from common consensus, but commit if I was not able to persuade the direction (yes, sometimes I'd revel in the fact that my different opinion was in fact the right one), but the reality was that I'd support the notion even if I didn't agree with it.

Throughout most of 2026, I have been considering the fact that I often don't think in similar ways to my peers. Often, a problem that is presented to me I solve in a way that's not always the way in which many of them would solve it. It's taken most of the year for me to come to the realisation that I just think differently, and it has been serving me well.

I think the broad exposure I've had over the years has allowed me to see a problem from multiple angles, which often exposes a different way to solve that problem. So if this post is here to help someone, sometimes thinking in different ways is valuable. It's the ability to consider the problem and to also consider multiple different solutions even though someone else has already presented a viable solution.

It's also worth saying that it's very rare to only have one viable solution and that most times there are multiple solutions that each have their own pros and cons. A part of that is not always applying the same thinking to every situation or problem.

Changing the way we think of a problem is often very useful. Applying enterprise architectures to small businesses often isn't the right approach. The way we handle problems presented by business people and problems presented by technical people requires us to think in different ways.

It's okay to think differently, and it's also okay to think in different ways. So I'd say this: the next time you start deciding on the solution to something, ask yourself if you can think differently about the problem.