Priming the pump

This week’s prompt

What does the stream in my backyard tell me about how ideas form?

There’s a ruisseau (French for stream) at the bottom of our garden.

It wends its way through the village of Urrugne, in French Basque Country, before connecting into the Unxin river and running into the Atlantic ocean about 3km downstream.

This little stream is the site of many a family adventure - a mini Amazon for young explorers. But there’s a dark secret hidden under the water.

One night, a few years ago, my father-in-law Bernard carried out a dastardly plan. Under the cover of darkness, he slipped on his gumboots. He scrambled down the bank, into the cool water.

He fed a length of PVC pipe through a freshly cut hole in the back garden fence. He submerged one end of the pipe in the stream, with a one-way valve attached. He placed a block of wood on top to hold the pipe on the streambed. 

His mission? Fill up the swimming pool and water the garden, using water from the stream. Unlimited free water - clever. But legal? As the French would say, with a shrug of the shoulders - pfffff. Je sais pas.

The next day, he plugged in an industrial-grade electric pump and connected the pipe. He flicked the switch. The pump whirred into life. Bernard waited for water to bubble up through the discharge flow. He waited. And waited. Nothing. The pump started to make a strange noise. Not a drop of water came out.

Merde.

He’d forgotten the crucial step.

Bernard had forgotten to prime the pump. That means tipping roughly 1L of water into the discharge valve to create a vacuum and the pressure needed to pump water out of the stream.

Once up and running, this pump loads 100s of litres of water per minute into our garden hose. It’s incredibly powerful and efficient. But it’s completely useless without being primed.

How do we prime our thinking?

Here’s where the stream enters the chat. We all have a river of thoughts & ideas bubbling through our minds. There’s no shortage of ‘water’. But to extract it in a useful way, and to distribute those thoughts, even humans need priming.

After spending dozens of hours helping smart people extract and articulate their most important thoughts, I’ve found we all prime the pump between our ears in one of two ways:

1. think to talk

2. talk to think

Interestingly, I’ve noticed a clear preference in the people I’ve worked with over the years.

Talk to think, or think to talk?

Most people I’ve interviewed (I’d say 70-80%) need to ‘talk to think’, that is, they benefit from a thoughtful question, followed by clear air for them to fill with words. As the conversation unfolds, ideas are refined, sculpted, and sometimes scrapped for entirely new ones. It’s fun to watch.

That said, some clients need time and space to think to talk. They work best with a list of thought starters and questions well in advance, with time to delegate their thinking to the subconscious. Once they’ve prepped and primed on their own, they’re ready to talk. Ideas tend to be birthed, more than sculpted.

So what?

Understanding your thinking style and the primer you need is the first step to crafting better ideas.

If you lean towards talk to think, who do you talk to regularly about your ideas? For many of us working remote, often on our own, it’s easy to fall out of the habit of vocalising our ideas and letting our thoughts unfold into words.

If you think to talk, have you got regular clear space in your life to allow the subconscious to do its work? Or are you always in doing mode?

A prompt for you:

Do you think to talk, or talk to think? I’d love to hear from you.