What do you do with a cheat sheet? I don’t mean the haphazard notes I’d make as a child the night before a test at school, hoping they would magically help me memorise everything I’d need! I mean the carefully constructed ‘cheat sheets’ appearing on LinkedIn – or at least in my feed. I always appreciate the effort someone has made to identify, label, categorise, and offer a framework or lens on a particular theme. But how should we use these cheat sheets? Cheating suggests something we won’t need to work too hard at – a quick win. But, as I remember from school, I believe we are only cheating ourselves if we use these cheat sheets as the end product, rather than as the starting point for our own thinking…
I have seen some interesting cheat sheets recently on LinkedIn, such as those categorising different types of bias, leadership frameworks, approaches to mindfulness, and so on. In other contexts in which I’ve worked, these have been called knowledge organisers. There has obviously been a lot of thinking, learning, knowledge building, and sharing by those producing these one-page summaries or visuals. So, how can we in turn use them to really add to our own understanding and progress, rather than just using them as a quick tick list? Here are my thoughts.
Analytical skills have been identified as one of the key skills needed for the workforce over the next few years and beyond. In the same way that we need to challenge the results of searches from Large Language Model (LLM) AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, we also need to get analytical, think critically, and actively engage with cheat sheets to get the most out of them. Try the following questions to get you started:
What’s in and what’s out?
- What question or questions does the cheat sheet intend to answer? What is its purpose, and what boundaries have been set? How might you use it as a starting point to explore your thinking on this topic or to answer your questions? What doesn’t it tell you? Could it be more precise in its language use? What content is included, and what isn’t?
What patterns are used?
- How is content categorised and organised, and broken down into wholes and parts of a thing or system? Are there different ways of clumping or categorising? Do you need to zoom out to see how these ideas are part of a bigger picture, or zoom in further to break things down into smaller parts? Is there any content that challenges your current knowledge and thinking?
What connections or relationships ?
- How are ideas connected and related to one another? Are potential actions and reactions between ideas in the cheat sheet obvious or inferred? How would you connect the ideas to your knowledge and understanding of the themes included?
Whose perspective?
- What or whose lens and focus does this use? Is it an individual or a group of individuals’ lens and focus? Does it use a single perspective or incorporate multiple mental models – these could be underpinned and framed by particular theories or contexts, for example, in leadership or wellbeing, geographical or economic models, or sectors?
I may have created a cheat sheet myself here! My approach is based in systems thinking, powerful knowledge, and systems leadership. There are further questions you could use – but by looking at what’s included or not, the patterns, connections and relationships, and perspectives, you have the core thinking skills that underpin many different types of thinking, such as analysis, creative thinking, future-oriented thinking, problem-solving, mental flexibility, emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, and many more. Now that is a real ‘cheat’ – let me know how you get on using these ideas.