Grant Margison developed a technique called ‘gridlock’ which he has used to great effect in many different situations.  It’s a method for dealing with opposing views in a way that extracts the best from each.  I have heard Grant talk about gridlock many times but didn’t realise, until recently, that I’d really only understood it on an intellectual level and not on a ‘doing’ level.

A couple of months ago I taught a change management course and, when I taught the gridlock component found myself really understanding it at a deep level – isn’t that often the way?  One has to teach something to truly learn it.

What was remarkable though was what happened afterwards.  In my work with several organisations around the country I found gridlocks springing up all over the place.  By being able to mentally put the opposing views ‘side by side’ in my head I built a clearer picture of what was going on and was better able to help the organisations deal with the issues.

In my information management work, here are some of the typical gridlocks that emerge:

Leadership

Getting Started

Autonomy versus centralisation

And the other remarkable realisation….I found gridlocks in my personal life as well.  Have you ever felt like “part of me wants to go to the gym but part of me thinks it would be better to just relax at home” or something similar?  Then you’re encountering an internal gridlock – two opposing views both with best intent but different means of getting there. 

The good news is that the first step in dealing with a gridlock is recognising that it exists – setting it up mentally.   The next step involves a simple but effective process.

I’m a devotee of Library Thing.  Library Thing is an online tool that allows you to catalogue your personal library and share it with others.  When I first joined Library Thing I spent a happy afternoon entering my books – yes, I know…. and now I just update my entries when new shipments arrive from Amazon. One of the great features is that when I type in a book title Library Thing will find the book for me (or a selection and allow me to select the one concerned) and then populate all the other information about it – including a picture of the cover.  This alleviates the boredom factor of having to painstakingly apply lots of metadata about one’s books.

I haven’t bothered to look at other peoples’ libraries but I have downloaded and installed the Wordpress widget which you can see in the bottom right hand menu.  This randomly circles through my library presenting 4-5 books.  Very cool – I feel this gives me some value from the time I spent putting the book titles in.  It’s always a great reminder of some of the gems sitting on my shelf that I might have forgotten about.

I’ve been using Delicious since 2005.  Delicious describes itself as a social bookmarking site.  You can bookmark and tag the sites that interest you and share them with others as well as looking at what other people who tagged the same sites as you have also tagged. 

So, in about three years – give or take – I have built up a decent amount of bookmarks.  What I liked initially was the ability to tag websites to more than one topic and it got around the dreadfully long list that I had in my favourites.

Over time though I’ve realised that it really is the place where, for me, favourite websites go to die.  I simply never go back to them.  When I’m following a rabbit hole on the web I chose to create new rabbit holes rather than looking at the old ones.

When I first started using Delicious it was a good tool for keeping track of the various blogs that I followed.  For the past year or so I have been using Bloglines which allows me to subscribe to blogs and presents me with the updates when they occur.  In fact, Bloglines is my home page on my desktop PC and I have 52 blogs that I watch.  Interestingly enough there are some that stay the same – the mainstays of my blog reading - and others that last from 3 – 6 months and then I move on.

But back to Delicious.  The fact that I almost never go back to things coupled with the fact that the blogs that I read are served up on Bloglines means that it really is a redundant tool for me.  I’m over it.